RE: iSCSI: No Framing

[Black_David@emc.com]

> Those advocating a portion of the iSCSI application be in hardware below
the
> TCP transport should be willing to document information exchanged between
> layers, and the states held within this layer.  You wish the IETF to
endorse
> a scheme within a standards draft and yet not be allowed to understand its
> implementation.

That is a level of implementation detail that the IETF has historically
not demanded the exposure of, and it would certainly be inappropriate to
standardize.  To the extent that there are open source implementations of
this form, the information will be disclosed in due course, other
implementers will make their own decisions about what to make available.

> This scheme so modifies the application attempting FIM
> utilization, it would be impractical to describe this as not altering TCP.
> TCP is not just a wire specification.  Changing the receive packet into a
> memory array needs additional clarification beyond a claim this does not
> change TCP.

That is unfortunately a waste of list bandwidth.  With my WG chair hat
firmly on, it is my conclusion that Doug Otis has failed to provide
sufficient
technical support for his argument that FIM alters TCP, and hence I hereby
reject the procedural request that FIM be removed from the iSCSI draft
as being a modification of TCP that would be outside the IPS WG's charter.
Discussion of the merits of FIM is fine, and FIM may yet be removed from
the iSCSI draft for good technical reasons (or may not) but debating
whether FIM alters TCP is a waste of list bandwidth at this point.

I also state that it is the rough consensus of the IPS WG that TCP
will be used for the first version of iSCSI, and this is stated over Doug
Otis's continuing objections.  Doug would be better advised to work on
using SCTP for iSCSI rather than complaining about the fact that others
are not doing so.

These decisions are appealable in accordance with RFC 2026, but should
not be further discussed on this list.

Thanks,
--David

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David L. Black, Senior Technologist
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