Some targetcli and TCMU questions

Just got an email full of interesting questions, I hope the author will be ok with me answering them here so future searches will see them:

I searched on internet and I don’t find some relevant info about gluster api support via tcmu-runner. Can you tell me please if this support will be added to the stable redhat targetcli in the near future? And I want to know also which targetcli is recommended for setup (targetcli or targetcli-fb) and what is the status for targetcli-3.0.

tcmu-runner is a userspace daemon add-on to LIO that allows requests for a device to be handled by a user process. tcmu-runner has early support for using glfs (via gfapi). Both tcmu-runner and its glfs plugin are beta-quality and will need further work before they are ready for stable Fedora, much less a RHEL release. tcmu-runner just landed in Rawhide, but this is really just to make it easier to test.

RHEL & Fedora use targetcli-fb, which is a fork of targetcli, and what I work on. Since I’m working on both tcmu-runner and targetcli-fb, targetcli-fb will see TCMU support very early.

The -fb packages I maintain switched to a “fbXX” version scheme, so I think you must be referring to the other one 🙂 I don’t have any info about the RTS/Datera targetcli’s status, other than nobody likes having two versions, the targetcli maintainer and I have discussed unifying them into a common version, but the un-fun work of merging them has not happened yet.

2 thoughts on “Some targetcli and TCMU questions

  1. Jag

    What is the current status of LIO&TCMU-runner in RHEL? Is that over it’s beta phase?
    I tried it out on Fedora 25 and COS7 and results were the same. LUN definied as file backstore on gluster fuse mount point outperformed user:glfs based LUN.

  2. agrover Post author

    Mike Christie has taken over maintenance of TCMU. He has remedied some bottlenecks that were hampering its performance. There are also some other improvements coming in future kernels that should help in this area. RHEL 7.4 will support TCMU and should perform pretty well.

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