This was believed to be at the time, and still is to present day, the first iSCSI packets moved between a embedded consumer device acting as a target with initiator nodes from multiple operating systems running on commodity hardware across an ethernet network. On the Linux side, a heavly customized -xr branch of 2.2.21-pre1-xr7 was used as the base on the console.
LinuxWorld West August 2004 Stable export of internal Parallel ATA HDD
Download - TBD
The RTE that shipped with the PS2 Linux Kit uses programmed I/O to access the network and this limits the iSCSI traffic to ~35 Mbit/sec. That limit remains to this day under the original v2.2 based Linux port.
A physical DVD spinning in a DVD-ROM drive maxes out sequential transport access to it's ROM at around ~10 Mbit/sec. The same holds true for reading .VOB files from a mounted filesystem.
The original Playstation 2 Parallel ATA (PATA) controller and disk would top out around ~8 MB/sec.
Futher demos have been show with this setup using three laptops running DVD quality video, and two PDAs accessing music and lower bitrate MPEG video and started running up against the ~35 Mbit/sec barrier.
The Initiators used on the PDAs (HP Ipaqs) where running what later became Core-iSCSI on Linux v2.4 with mixed export of PATA and USB based storage blocks from the Playstation 2 console.
The above was done using the original Playstation 2 Models. The newer Slim PS2 Models lacking the PATA controller, where able to export an external USB HDD. Note that this remains a TODO item as breakage was seen between those newer models and drivers/net/smap.c. (If anyone has more information on this, please contact nab)
A huge thanks to bacchus (Ralf Baechle) from linux-mips.org, seklos (Wim Coekerts) from Oracle, the PS2Linux community and PyX team.
1) Core-iSCSI backport to v2.2... OR 2) v2.6 current forwardport to RTE (sigh) .. OR 3) v2.6 current to open source RTE from mrbrown/ps2dev (yay!) 4) PS2 Independence Exploit for large scale iSCSI target retrofits 5) Watching DVD via Framebuffer or Xfree over core-iscsi 6) Break PS2+RTE/PIO+iSCSI Barrier 7) iSCSI on the Slim Playstation2