On Mon, 2006-31-07 at 08:30 -0400, John W. Linville wrote: > On Mon, Jul 31, 2006 at 10:15:40AM +0200, Christophe Devriese wrote: > > > If you bond 2 vlan subinterfaces, the patch is not necessary at all. In > > that > > case also the source device will be changed from eth0.<vlan> to bond<x>. So > > that's correct behavior no ? > > > > In the second case, you create vlan subifs on a bonding device, vlan > > subinterfaces will be created on the slave interfaces. In that case the > > vlan > > (This is not directed at Christophe, or anyone in particular...) > > <rant> > > Am I the only one that thinks that our handling of LAN L2 stuff > is at best a little "too" flexible (and at worst a collection of > nasty hacks)? > > I mean, do we really need both the ability to bond multiple vlan > interfaces AND the ability to have vlan interfaces on top of a bond? > How many people really appreciate the subtle(?) differences? > > Then throw bridging into the mix! If I'm using VLANs and bonds in > a bridged environment, do I bridge the bonds, or bond the bridges? > Do the VLANs come before the bonds? after the bridges? or somewhere > in-between? Do all these combinations even work together? Who has > the definitive answer (besides the code itself)? > > I have no doubt that there are plenty of opportunities for cleverness > here (and no doubt dragons too). I just doubt that most of them > are worth the complexities introduced by our current collection of > "transparently" stackable pseudo-drivers and strategically placed hacks > (e.g. skb_bond). All that, and it still isn't clear to me how we > can cleanly accomodate 802.1s (which adds VLAN awareness to bridging). > > Do we hold the view that our L2 code is on par with the rest of > our code? Is there an appetite for a clean-up? Or is it just me? > > </rant> > > If you made it this far, thanks for listening...I feel better now. :-)
Yes, I made it this far and you do make good arguement (or i may be over-dosed ;->). I have seen the following setups that are useful: 1) Vlans with bridges; in which one or more vlans exist per ethernet port. Broadcast packets within such vlans are restricted to just those vlans by the bridge. 2) complicate the above a little by having multiple spanning trees. 3) Add to the above link layer HA (802.1ad or otherwise as presented today by Bonding). To answer your question; i think yes we need all 3. Unfortunately the 3 above are all done by different people with different intentions altogether. I think BGrears end goal was VLANs for an end host. I think Lennert wrote the original Bridge code and for a while had some VLAN code that worked well with bridging (that code died as far as i know). Then bonding - theres some pre-historic relation to it since D Becker days and then the good folks from Intel adding about 1M features to it. Yes, the fact all 3 need to work together is a mess ;-> (but there are good pragmatic reasons for them to work together)... Hope that helps ;-> cheers, jamal - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe netdev" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
