We’re pleased to announce that we’ve re-released our HBAAPI vendor library for Linux. We named it libhbalinux. It’s now using standard kernel interfaces to obtain information about the FC HBAs in the system. We licesenced it under the LGPL so that the library is open source but may also be used by proprietary managment applications. What we published is a good start that we plan to continue to develop on. We hope that this vendor library will become the default HBAAPI vendor library for Linux. At this point contributions and questions should take place on the Open-FCoE development mailing list.
The repository is visible on our gitweb page and is accessable from the following git URL.
git://open-fcoe.org/openfc/libhbalinux.git
We’ll also add new options to fcoeadm to display information about Open-FCoE HBAs using libhbalinux.
The Open-FCoE team is pleased to announce that the re-architecture of our Fibre Channel code is complete!
We’ve reduced the number of files from 85 to 25 and the number of lines from 23,114 to 12,291 (at the time of this posting). The main focus of the re-architecture was converting the OpenFC subsystem to libfc, a Fibre Channel protocol assist library. We have posted a RFC to the linux-scsi mailing list to solicit feedback from the community and will continue to seek in-kernel inclusion.
We have some design diagrams posted on our wiki as well as a list of TODO items that we will continue to work on.
The repositories have been re-organized in an attempt to simplify the layout. We now have one repository that we are using for development. The other repositories are still available, but contain tools and the SW target which are out of date and not currently under development. Our initiator repository is:
open-fcoe-initiator: A clone of the scsi-rc-fixes kernel with the libfc and fcoe code applied. This is our only initiator development tree and we will continue to contribute patches to this repository. Clone with “git clone git://open-fcoe.org/openfc/open-fcoe-initiator.git”.
At the time of this posting there is no userspace application for the new code base. Upon loading the fcoe module the /sys/module/fcoe/create and /sys/module/fcoe/destroy files will be apear. Writing the name of your Ethernet interface into those files will either bring up or tear down the FCoE stack. Please refer to the quickstart guide on the wiki for more details.
We’ve reorganized our repository layout to better distinguish each code base. This is the new layout,
git://open-fcoe.org/openfc/open-fcoe.git
- fcconf
- fcping
- out-of-kernel build of kernel modules
git://open-fcoe.org/openfc/open-fcoe-upstream.git
- The Open-FCoE initiator based on SCSI development tree
git://open-fcoe.org/openfc/open-fcoe-target.git
- The Open-FCoE SW target based on 2.6.23 kernel and the SCST project
git://open-fcoe.org/openfc/open-fcoe-devtools.git
We will keep a soft link named open-fcoe-misc that will link to the open-fcoe-target repository to assist migration to the new FCoE SW target repository name. We will eventually remove the open-fcoe-misc link, so please start using the open-fcoe-target git URL provided above for the FCoE SW target.
Since the v2.6.25 tag has been applied to the Linux kernel we have created a compatible tarball of our code and put it on the downloads page.
Nothing additional has been done to this tarball in preparation for its release. It is simply the tip of our tree at the time 2.6.25 was tagged. All defects present in our git tree at that time are also present in the tarball.
Users wishing to use this tarball would need to get a 2.6.25 Linux kernel from www.kernel.org to compile the code against.
Since the v2.6.24 tag has been applied to the Linux kernel we have created a compatible tarball of our code and put it on the downloads page.
Nothing additional has been done to this tarball in preparation for its release. It is simply the tip of our tree at the time 2.6.24 was tagged. All defects present in our git tree at that time are also present in the tarball.
Users wishing to use this tarball would need to get a 2.6.24 Linux kernel from www.kernel.org to compile the code against.
Open-FCoE is the home of the Fibre Channel over Ethernet implementation for the Linux operating system. Our code base provides some Fibre Channel protocol processing as well as the encapsulation of FC frames within Ethernet packets. We are excited to bring this technology to the public and will do our best to facilitate everyone on this site.
We’ve created a mailing list for developers. However, we believe that most discussions will take place on the SCSI mailing list. We will post details as we understand more about how we’ll work with the existing SCSI community.
The Bugzilla and Wiki are open for anyone. We would like to keep it that way unless spam becomes a problem in which case we will tighten up access. We will also be configuring them more as this project evolves. We would like for these tools to be used heavily as they’ll help ensure we have a quality experience for both developers and users.
The download page has a single tarball of our open-fcoe tree at the time of this project’s launch. It is a derivative of the SCSI –rc tree and is therefore currently under development, which means it might be a bit unstable. We will work to make more stable tarballs available for download as the project matures.
Our SW Target, which resides in the –misc repository, relies on SCST. At this project’s launch time we did not have SCST working with the 2.6.24-rc2 tree. We wanted something usable so we’ve copied our old 2.6.23 compatible code into this repository for now. You’ll need to get a vanilla 2.6.23 kernel and follow the INSTALL document in the –misc tree to get the target to work.
To reiterate, the initiator is working with the SCSI 2.6.24-rc tree (which is contained in the –upstream repository) and the SW Target works on a vanilla 2.6.23 tree. We’ve written a rough quickstart guide to help everyone get started.
Thank you and welcome to Open-FCoE.org!