On Tue, 29 Jul 2008 13:56:14 -0500
James Bottomley [off-list ref] wrote:

On Tue, 2008-07-29 at 14:54 -0400, Ric Wheeler wrote:

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Martin K. Petersen wrote:

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"James" == James Bottomley [off-list ref] writes:
            

James> The problem, which ata_ram also suffers, is that the tools we
James> most need to test are the ones for manipulating non volatile
James> characteristics (like partition tables).  We'd really like the
James> disk contents to survive reboot for this ...

Yeah, I should add that I wanted persistence too.  I went through a
whole stack (well, 5-6 or so) fibre channel drives from various
vendors and attempted to low-level format them to 4KB sectors.  Most
of them laughed in my face.  One of them tried to comply and
irreparably confused its firmware in the process.

Just yesterday I received a couple of prototype drives in the mail.
I'll ask the vendor whether they support 4KB and if so I'll give them
a whirl.
  

Isn't this a great use case for a SCSI target device where our target 
can be a software disk on a remote host? What is missing for us to put 
something like that together?

Technically nothing.  Tomo should already have one for the STGT test
infrastructure (I've cc'd him).

Yeah, stgt also enables you to use a software media changer and a
software DVD drive (and we are working on VTL).

http://stgt.berlios.de/

You can connect to a remote host with iSCSI. FCoE might work since
Mike Christie has used stgt to work on the FCoE initiator driver.

stgt doesn't support non-512 byte sector sizes now but I'll add the
support shortly. I want to try DIF with iSCSI and FCoE.