Re: [gentoo-user] iscsitarget or targetcli?

[J. Roeleveld]

On Thursday, January 29, 2015 02:18:13 PM Andrea Conti wrote:
> On 29/01/15 11:25, J. Roeleveld wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I want to set up an iSCSI server (target in iSCSI terminology) running on
> > Gentoo.
> > Does anyone know which of the following 2 are better:
> > -  sys-block/iscsitarget
> > -  sys-block/targetcli
> >
> > Both don't seem to have had an update for over 2 years, but targetcli
> > seems to be just the config-tool for whatever is in current kernels
> > where, I think, iscsitarget is a userspace daemon?
> >
> > Many thanks,
> >
> > Joost
>
> Hi,
>
> sys-block/iscsitarget is composed of a kernel module and a userspace
> daemon, both compiled and installed by the ebuild.

That's what I thought as well.

LIO / targetcli does seem to work and is implemented into the Linux kernel.

Is there anyone with actual experience with this together with Gentoo?
As I said, my initial quick tests showed that it works the way I want it to.

> I would second the recommendation for SCST, which is actively developed
> and in my experience is quite more stable and tends to recover better
> from unexpected events than sys-block/iscsitarget (I have used both for
> quite some time).
>
> The only downside of SCST is that it requires a bit more work to
> install, mainly because there is no ebuild for it; moreover, while it
> can be built against and run on a stock kernel, it comes with a couple
> of kernel patches which should be applied for optimal performance or are
> needed fot specific features (e.g. the vdisk backend).

I had a look at it, but the howtos I find are all based on older kernels 
(2.6.x). I am currently using 3.14.27 for my testing as ZFS requires a kernel 
older then 3.16.

I am reluctant to apply kernel patches, would prefer just some modules.
The documentation for installing SCST is scarcer then for LIO/targetcli. (The 
latter has recent documentation on the Arch-linux site)

--
Joost