RE: iSCSI draft-07 Padding

[Robert Snively <rsnively@Brocade.COM>]

Fibre Channel's approach to this problem is to prohibit padding
for all transfers except the transfer that moves the last bytes
in the last (or highest pointer value) burst of data.  Intermediate
bursts are required to end on 4-byte boundaries, regardless of
tranfer order as allowed by EMDP.

Bob

----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Schoberg" <michael_schoberg@cnt.com>
To: <ips@ece.cmu.edu>
Sent: Friday, July 20, 2001 4:27 PM
Subject: iSCSI draft-07 Padding


> I couldn't find anything in the latest iSCSI spec (draft-07) that prevents
> someone from issuing multiple padded PDU's for iSCSI Data In/Out segments.
> I guess I'm worried that someone could issue padded odd-length write/read
> data when it wasn't necessary.  Example: When moving a 512 byte disk
sector
> an initiator/target could legally issue 512 1-byte DataSegmentLength
> messages (each padded up to a 32-bit boundary).  This isn't the sort of
data
> stream one would expect, but it's allowed in the draft.
>
> This also leads into whether fixed or minimum length data segments (for
all
> but the last) would be nice to include as part of the spec.  It may result
> in a simpler software/hardware design.
>