I've managed to reproduce this bug, and all the details match, excepting that my appropriate dmesg output looks like:
... [ 19.635647] iSCSI Enterprise Target Software - version 1.4.20.2 [ 19.637345] iscsi_trgt: Registered io type fileio [ 19.637360] iscsi_trgt: Registered io type blockio [ 19.637369] iscsi_trgt: Registered io type nullio ... and my setup is already set to automatic. Available to run tests, reproduce on other machines, get my sequence down better, etc... Julia Longtin