
	     Open Fabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED)
              iSER initiator in OFED 1.4 Release Notes

			   December 2008


* Background

	iSER allows iSCSI to be layered over RDMA transports (including
	InfiniBand and iWARP (RNIC)).

	The OpenFabrics iSER initiator implementation is interoperable with
	open-iscsi (http://www.open-iscsi.org/). It provides an alternative
	transport to iscsi_tcp in the open-iscsi framework. The iSER transport
	exposes a transport API to scsi_transport_iscsi, and a SCSI LLD API to
	the Linux SCSI mid-layer (scsi_mod). Currently, the OpenFabrics iSER
	initiator can be layered over InfiniBand (no iWARP support yet).

* Supported platforms

	SLES 10
	SLES 10 sp1
	SLES 10 sp2
	RHAS 4 up4
	RHAS 4 up5
	RHAS 4 up6
	RHAS 4 up7
	RHEL 5
	RHEL 5.1
	RHEL 5.2

	The release has been tested against Voltaire iSCSI over iSER target
	running in Voltaire's IB/Fibre-Channel router (SR4G) and the STGT
	target.

* Fixed Bugs and Enhancements since OFED 1.3
	iSER:
	- Add logical unit reset support
	- Update URLs of iSER docs
	- Add change_queue_depth method
	- Fix list iteration bug
	- Handle iser_device allocation error gracefully
	- Don't change ITT endianness
	- Move high-volume debug output to higher debug level
	- Count FMR alignment violations per session
	Open-iSCSI:
	- Update open-iscsi rpm versions from
	  2.0-754 to 2.0-754.1 and from 2.0-865.15 to 2.0-869.2
	- Change open-iscsi defaults
	- iscsi_discovery: fixed printing debug information
	- iscsi_discovery: check if iscsid is running
	- Set open-iscsi for auto-startup when installing OFED
	- iscsiadm: bail out if daemon isn't running

* Known Issues
	Open-iSCSI:
	- modifing node transport_name while session is active
	  will create stale session. It will be deleted only after reboot.
	- This issue is scheduled for OFED1.4 as part of new open-iscsi version.

* Installation/upgrade of open-iscsi
	If iSER is selected to be installed with OFED, open-iscsi will be also
	installed (or upgraded if another version of open-iscsi is already
	installed).  Installing/upgrading open-iscsi is required for iSER to
	work properly. Before installing OFED, please make sure that no version
	of open-iscsi is installed or add the following key to your ofed.conf
	file: upgrade_open_iscsi=yes. Using this key will remove any old version
	of open-iscsi.

	If an older version of open-iscsi was installed, it is recommended to
	delete its records before running open-iscsi. This can easily be done by
	running the following command (while open-iscsi is stopped):

	rm -rf /etc/iscsi/nodes/* /etc/iscsi/send_targets/*

	Then, open-iscsi may be started, and targets may be discovered by running
	'iscsi_discovery <target_ip>'.

* iSER links

	Wiki pages

	Information on building/configuring/running the open iscsi initiator over
	iSER: https://wiki.openfabrics.org/tiki-index.php?page=iSER

	IETF pages

	iSCSI and iSER specifications come out of the IETF IP storage (IPS) work
	group.

	iSCSI specification:    http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3720.txt
	iSER specification:     http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5046.txt

	"About" page

	general and detailed information on iSCSI and iSER
	http://www.voltaire.com/Products/Server_Products/iSER_iSCSI_RDMA

