Monthly Archives: September 2015

RHEL 7.2 has an updated kernel target

Leave a reply

As mentioned in the beta release notes, the kernel in RHEL 7.2 contains a rebased LIO kernel target, to the equivalent of the Linux 4.0.stable series.

This is a big update. LIO has improved greatly since 3.10. It has added support for SCSI features that enable VMWare VAAI support, as well as data integrity (DIF), and significant iSER work, for those of you using Infiniband. (SRP is also supported, as well as iSCSI and FCoE, of course.)

Note that we still do not ship support for the Fibre Channel qla2xxx fabric. It still seems to be something storage vendors and integrators want, more than a feature our customers are telling us they want in RHEL.

(On a side note, Infiniband hardware is pretty affordable these days! For all you datacenter hobbyists who have a rack in the garage, I might suggest a cheap previous-gen IB setup and either SRP or iSER as the way to go and still get really high IOPs.)

Users of RHEL 7’s SCSI target should find RHEL 7.2 to be a very nice upgrade. Please try the beta out and report any issues you find of course, but it’s looking really good so far.

Wisdom from Reddit

1 Reply

If you have a bit of life experience, you’ll see that it often takes a disproportional amount of political effort to get people that are stubbornly doing the wrong thing to change their minds. Most of the time, you would get much more done by just doing it yourself instead of spending months trying to get someone else to do it, or at least to stop blocking you from doing it, then to stop undoing your work the moment they let you do it correctly. You know that you’re in a problematic environment when nothing ever gets done unless the people in supervisory roles aren’t looking and know nothing about what you’re doing.

Also, you really can’t go into a project wanting to tear the whole thing down when no one else shares your opinion. That’s a recipe for disaster for all involved. It will turn toxic. Fast. The only time that’s feasible is when you have the power to boot anyone that disagrees with you. You will have to be a dictator to make it work.

— 0b01010001