Yeah, something like that. I was arguing for that when iSCSI was pretty new so I went with a remote DMA model that was somewhat simpler. I had a whole startup

Yeah, something like that. I was arguing for that when iSCSI was pretty new so I went with a remote DMA model that was somewhat simpler. I had a whole startup sketched out, it's pretty obvious when you think about it. Desktops get a software only version that will do reasonably well and is cheap. Power users/small servers get a slightly more expensive (maybe 2x the cost of a PCI card) that does the remote DMA in hardware; this card is one ethernet port and only handles one DMA at a time. Big servers get a multi port card that will run multiple streams at once. I tried to get the disk drive people interested because there already is a processor down on the drives that is a general purpose CPU (there are two, one that controls the disk arm, that's special, and one that manages the cache, read ahead/write behind, that could run a stripped down Linux or whatever and do the other side of the protocol). The drive people never got excited because the cost savings of el cheapo ethernet wasn't enough to offset the cost of the extra memory they felt they would need.