retitle 149897 equalize kernel patch not available for current kernels? thanks
On lör, 2007-12-29 at 13:22 +0100, Andreas Henriksson wrote: > Very good to hear this has resolved itself. The only thing that remains > is the false statement in the documentation about having to patch the > kernel. Lets treat this report as a bug against the documentation from > now on. I'll try to dig some and see if I can find it which kernel > version the support first appeared. It seems like the required patch[1] which implements the feature is only available for 2.4.18. As far as I can tell it only /looks/ like it works with current kernels, because the kernel has the RTM_F_EQUALIZE flag (but no actual implementation). The flag has been there since atleast 2.4.0. man 7 rtnetlink says: "RTM_F_EQUALIZE a multicast equalizer (not yet implemented)" grepping linux 2.6.22 source for RTM_F_EQUALIZE only gets a single hit, the definition. It's not actually used anywhere. ./include/linux/rtnetlink.h:#define RTM_F_EQUALIZE 0x400 /* Multipath equalizer: NI */ (I guess NI in the comment means "Not Implemented".) I haven't found out why the patch hasn't been merged, but I did find some discussion[2] between Guus Sliepen (original patch author?) and Patrick McHardy which seems to mention some of the problems in it. One of those might be the reason it never got merged in mainline. So..... Updating the documentation to state the fact that the required kernel patch doesn't exist (for kernels supported by Debian) doesn't seem very useful. Possibly the support for equalize in iproute should be dropped completely since it's never been part of any official kernel release, and since it hasn't been solved in all these years noone will probably ever implement this. I'll ask upstream.... [1] http://www.trash.net/~kaber/equalize/ [2] http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0203.2/1314.html -- Regards, Andreas Henriksson
