What is Open-iSCSI?

Open-iSCSI project is a high performance, transport independent, multi-platform implementation of RFC3720. Goals and features:

    * Data Path & Performance

The data path code lives in the kernel and concerns itself only with moving data. The best performance on any given platform is the major requirement for Open-iSCSI project.
Today's numbers are:

single iSCSI session:

    * 450MB/s Read and 450 MB/s Write for 64KB block
    * 510 MB/s Read and 550 MB/s Write for 256KB block
    * 65,000 IOPS - 1K, 58,000 IOPS - 2K, 50,000 IOPS with 4KB Read

two iSCSI sessions:

    * 550 MB/s Read and 810 MB/s Write for 256KB block
    * 75,000 IOPS for 1K block

(single connection, 10GbE network, 2.4Ghz dual Opteron, UNH or IET targets).

    * Minimal footprint in the kernel

It is our strong opinion that existing Initiators bloat the kernel with ever-growing control plane code, including but not limited to: iSCSI discovery, Login (Authentication and Operational phases), session and connection management, connection-level error processing, iSCSI Text, Nop-Out/In handling, iSNS, SLP, Radius...
One of our project's initial and primary requirements: the entire control plane resides in the user space.

    * User/Kernel Interface

User/Kernel interface for Open-iSCSI means - the interface between Control and Data planes. This asynchronous interface is implemented using Netlink Sockets.