This patch series is the third version (see below link to V2) of the suggested changes to the bonding driver so it would be able to support non ARPHRD_ETHER netdevices for its High-Availability (active-backup) mode.
The motivation is to enable the bonding driver on its HA mode to work with the IP over Infiniband (IPoIB) driver. With these patches I was able to enslave IPoIB netdevices and run TCP, UDP, IP (UDP) Multicast and ICMP traffic with fail-over and fail-back working fine. The working environment was the net-2.6 git. More over, as IPoIB is also the IB ARP provider for the RDMA CM driver which is used by native IB ULPs whose addressing scheme is based on IP (e.g. iSER, SDP, Lustre, NFSoRDMA, RDS), bonding support for IPoIB devices **enables** HA for these ULPs. This holds as when the ULP is informed by the IB HW on the failure of the current IB connection, it just need to reconnect, where the bonding device will now issue the IB ARP over the active IPoIB slave. This series also includes patches to the IPoIB driver that fix some fix some neighboring related issues. There are still 2 open issues here: 1. When bonding enslaves an IPoIB device the bonding neighbor holds a reference to a cleanup function in the IPoIB drives. This makes it unsafe to unload the IPoIB module if there are bonding neighbors in the air. So, to avoid this race one must unload bonding before unloading IPoIB. 2. Patch No. 7 is a workaround to a problem where gratuitous were not sent quite often. I didn't find something better that fixes this and I would appreciate advices and comments regarding it. However, this doesn't seem to me as an issue related exclusively to IPoIB. Links to earlier discussion: 1. A discussion in netdev about bonding support for IPoIB. http://lists.openwall.net/netdev/2006/11/30/46 2. A discussion in openfabrics regarding changes in the IPoIB that enable using it as a slave for bonding. http://lists.openfabrics.org/pipermail/general/2007-March/034033.html - 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