From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Patrick McHardy Subject: Re: BUG: bonding module can only be loaded once Date: Tue, 09 Jun 2009 18:27:14 +0200 Message-ID: <4A2E8D62.6090004@trash.net> References: <20090608151127.70146505@nehalam> <200906091406.45463.arnd@arndb.de> <20090609080232.45f81833@nehalam> <4A2E80B3.6010600@trash.net> <4752.1244564082@death.nxdomain.ibm.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-15; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: Stephen Hemminger , Arnd Bergmann , "David S. Miller" , bonding-devel@lists.sf.net, netdev@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org To: Jay Vosburgh Return-path: In-Reply-To: <4752.1244564082@death.nxdomain.ibm.com> Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: netdev.vger.kernel.org Jay Vosburgh wrote: > Patrick McHardy wrote: > >> In any case, this is not the first time this has been broken and the >> fundamental reason is in my opinion that the bonding interface is >> broken to begin with. The module aliasing thing is complete crap >> and should have been phased out long ago. At this point its probably >> not worth anymore to migrate people to the sysfs interface though, >> the best thing would be to add an rtnl_link interface and phase out >> both. > > The "load bonding multiple times" stuff is only there now for > backwards compatibility with old distro initscripts / sysconfig packages > that don't configure bonding through sysfs (a sysfs API was added to > bonding three or four years ago). > > All of the current distro releases I'm aware of use sysfs to > configure bonding, and have done so for at least a year or two. I > haven't done an exhaustive survey, but it seems unlikely that users are > running a current up to date kernel with a two or three year old > initscripts / sysconfig package. Anybody have information to the > contrary? I'd expect its not the distros, but rather the applicances which might still be using this. I know a vendor I used to work for a couple of years ago just recently made the switch from 2.6.16 to a current kernel, and I'd expect that they are still using this (I can find out tommorrow if you want to know for sure). Vyatta likewise, I guess. > If nobody has any heartburn at dropping support for multiple > bonding instances on old distros, I'm as happy as anybody to remove all > of the multiple load logic from bonding. There's been plenty of time > for transitioning from "multiple load" to sysfs. In my opinion it would need a feature-removal-schedule announcement.