Re: Linville's L2 rant... -- Re: PATCH Fix bonding active-backup behavior for VLAN interfaces

[Christophe Devriese <Christophe.Devriese@eurid.eu>]

On Monday 31 July 2006 14:30, you wrote:
> (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?

In all honesty, you cannot bond bridges :-p

> 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?

A vlan capable bridge with trunk ports and access ports would be nice :-p

I think the current code is nice. You need it to properly support 
virtualization and I find it very useful where I work to have this option.

Regards,

Christophe