On Tuesday 05 May 2009 22:08:44 Arc Riley wrote: > We're setting up batman-adv on open-mesh.com OM1P routers and > unidirectional antennas to connect homes and businesses across the city.
Cool ! May I ask who "we" is and how you would describe the current status ? > Is there currently a multicast protocol or method for a node on the network > to get local link stats from every other node on the network? We're > looking at this for a GUI desktop diagnostics tool which shows the current > 1-hop link states for all nodes on the network If you want to assemble a view of the whole topology the built-in vis server might be what you are looking for. I think the 24C3 video that you can find on our website describes how it works. > Is there a layer 3 solution for routing each end user to the nearest IP > gateway that works well on top of a batman-adv network? Actually, this gateway question puzzles us as well. We did not find a very good solution for this problem yet. Batman-adv knows the best route towards the gateway - no problem here. But how can we propate that upwards ? Setting a route (which would be layer 3) ? We could even create an API that allows other processes to retrieve the best gateway but we "just" have a mac address no IP address. > Does batman-adv currently support "bonding"; ie, will it route all packets > through the best connection until it's saturated, or will it spread packets > across connections (especially that are near the same quality) for optimal > speed? As soon as a link is used its link quality will go down as well but I think you are referring to a feature known as "Multipath Routing" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multipath_routing) ?! Currently, batman does not have this feature. I'm not aware of any implementation that does as it is quite tricky. If you know some let me know. :-) On the other hand Simon is working on "short distance" bonding (which simplifies the task a lot). So far we have no working code. > What kind of traffic throughput is the kernel module capable of? Does the > module multithread properly for multicore utilization? Would a FPGA > variant be needed to have a "mesh switch" or would a high-end multicore ARM > be reasonably able to handle say an 8-port gigabit mesh switch? I'm not the right guy to answer the "how much power do we need for an 8-port gigabit switch". This is not directly related to batman. I hope someone else can jump in. Batman-adv is fully multithreaded as every reasonable linux module should be. Thats one of the main reasons that make it quite time consuming to debug - every little race condition leads to crashes and then you look for the needle in the haystack. :-) > These questions are less to evaluate batman-adv for our uses than looking > forward at what we'll need to develop as we expand. Sounds great - we are looking forward to all kind of feedback / contributions. Let us know if you have more questions. Regards, Marek
