Hi everyone, I am evaluating the possibility to add some storage offloading capabilities to existing utilities. For example I'd be interested in leveraging WRITE SAME and EXTENDED COPY scsi commands to initialize and copy data on iscsi/fcp devices.
It seems that both commands could be easily added to dd, WRITE SAME for example could be implemented as the "sparse" conv (detecting zeroes in the input stream) and EXTENDED COPY can be attempted when input and output devices are sg devices. There's also a more ambitious goal of adding support for the device mapper (e.g. lvm logical volumes) reading the dm table and using the correct offsets to offload the initialization and the copy to the storage. I already did a quite extensive analysis on how to actually implement that but I don't want to mix too many subjects at once. As initial step I'd like to understand if there's some interest in adding offloading support to dd. Thanks, -- Federico
