tcmu-runner

A userspace daemon that handles the LIO TCM-User backstore

LIO is the SCSI target in the Linux kernel. It is entirely kernel code, and allows exported SCSI logical units (LUNs) to be backed by regular files or block devices. But, if we want to get fancier with the capabilities of the device we're emulating, the kernel is not necessarily the right place. While there are userspace libraries for compression, encryption, and clustered storage solutions like Ceph or Gluster, these are not accessible from the kernel. The TCMU userspace-passthrough backstore allows a userspace process to handle requests to a LUN. But since the kernel-user interface that TCMU provides must be fast and flexible, it is complex enough that we'd like to avoid each userspace handler having to write boilerplate code. tcmu-runner handles the messy details of the TCMU interface -- UIO, netlink, pthreads, and DBus -- and exports a more friendly C plugin module API. Modules using this API are called "TCMU handlers". Handler authors can write code just to handle the SCSI commands as desired, and can also link with whatever userspace libraries they like.