From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Frank Blaschka Subject: Re: 2.6.29 regression? Bonding tied to IPV6 in 29-rc5 Date: Wed, 18 Feb 2009 07:55:45 +0100 Message-ID: <499BB0F1.50507@linux.vnet.ibm.com> References: <20090217095232.5da06b9f@werewolf.home> <200902172001.41804.arvidjaar@mail.ru> <20090217.142946.232071526.davem@davemloft.net> <25143.1234932076@turing-police.cc.vt.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: David Miller , arvidjaar@mail.ru, rjw@sisk.pl, netdev@vger.kernel.org, bonding-devel@lists.sourceforge.net, jamagallon@ono.com, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org To: Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu Return-path: Received: from mtagate6.de.ibm.com ([195.212.29.155]:49258 "EHLO mtagate6.de.ibm.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752042AbZBRGzr (ORCPT ); Wed, 18 Feb 2009 01:55:47 -0500 In-Reply-To: <25143.1234932076@turing-police.cc.vt.edu> Sender: netdev-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: We have the same issue with the qeth_l3 driver (it requires IPv6 symbols). Distributors compile with IPv6 but some customes want to disable IPv6 without building a custom kernel. If there would be a generic solution to address this kind of runtime IPv6 dependencies this would be creat. Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu schrieb: > On Tue, 17 Feb 2009 14:29:46 PST, David Miller said: >> Don't configure ipv6 into your kernel, really. >> >> There is no other way to handle this. If we want to support >> IPV6 layer things in the bonding driver, it is going to >> call helper functions in the ipv6 module and therefore must >> be able to load it and use functions in it. > > What does a poor corporate user do if they're running a distro kernel that > was built with CONFIG_IPV6, but local security policy says "Disable IPv6 > because we don't do it yet, or because it breaks mission-critical software > package XYZ?" There's a *lot* of people who implement that by the "block > the ipv6 module from loading" trick. And building a kernel that doesn't > include IPv6 may not be feasible due to vendor certification issues... > > Heck, *I*'m almost in that boat - probably need to use bonded ethernet on some > servers because we can't get 10GigE, but the software used in the project the > servers were bought for blows chunks if it gets a whiff of an IPv6 address. > Ended up spending 3 weeks doing a massive kludgery of one sort in DNS for the > rest of the world, and equally massive lying in /etc/hosts for the hosts... > (Don't ask - it was long and ugly, and just disabling the module would have > saved me about 2.95 weeks of work, so I know where those people are coming > from...) >