[Pkg-iscsi-maintainers] Bug#850057: iscsistart -N skips offload NICs causing boot to fail

[Christian Seiler]

Control: tags -1 + confirmed upstream

On 01/03/2017 05:38 PM, Andrew Patterson wrote:
> The debian initramfs uses the IBFT support in iscsistart to log
> into the root volume. The initramfs script uses iscsistart -N to
> bring up the NICs before logging in with iscsstart -b. This
> process works fine when using non-offload NICs, but fails when
> using NICs using the bnx2, bnx2x, cxgb3, and cxgb4 drivers due to
> the following code in
> utils/fwparam_ibft/fw_entry.c:fw_setup_nics():
> 
>         list_for_each_entry(context, &targets, list) {
>             /* if it is a offload nic ignore it */
>             if (!net_get_transport_name_from_netdev(context->iface,
>                                 transport))
>                 continue
> 
> 
> Which does a lookup in the table in usr/iscsi_net_util.c
> 
>         static struct iscsi_net_driver net_drivers[] = {
>             {"cxgb3", "cxgb3i" },
>             {"cxgb4", "cxgb4i" },
>             {"bnx2", "bnx2i" },
>             {"bnx2x", "bnx2i"},
>             {NULL, NULL}
>         };
> 
> 
> to see if -N should skip this NIC.

Since I don't see how this would negatively affect setups that
work currently, I'd be willing to carry a patch in Debian that
simply removes this check, even if upstream hasn't decided on
a best course of action yet - especially since I didn't see
anybody on the upstream mailing list discouraging this.

Unless you beat me to it, I'll prepare a patch for this in the
Debian package.

Regards,
Christian