Feature requests / inquiries.

[Brooks Davis]

On Mon, Aug 29, 2005 at 05:56:25PM +0200, Bart Van Kerckhove wrote:
> Dear Sirs / Fellow Freebsd Freaks,
> 
> I've been using FreeBSD for a while now as a routing/firewalling platform, 
> but recent developments in our network infrastructure confront me with some 
> lack of features in the IPstack.
> In a nutshell, i'm looking for support for (in order of importance to me) : 
> (r)STP, ECMP, and LACP.
> 
> For STP, i have found a patch that contained a port from netbsd code of 
> if_bridge ; but i'm way too insecure about running this on a production 
> system.
> For ECMP, the only thing i found out was that there used to be a patchset 
> that did something like it, but went defunct after 4.8.
> LACP: no idea at all, sorry :)
> 
> As these are features we'll be using some time soon now, i can say we _need_ 
> them. I have even seriously considered moving to NetBSD; the lack of NIC 
> polling support for the intel chipsets i'm using is holding me back at the 
> moment.
> I do not want to move over to linux, for various reasons.
> So I figured perhaps some of the freebsd community is also interested in 
> these features, and I might as well sponsor (part of?) its development.
> Are there any persons interested in developing these features, or do they 
> already exist and am I just plain ignorant (forgive me if that is the case).
> Please note that i'm not interested in the netgraph approach, as that's 
> (imho) just a hack around it, and it's not functioning with for example 
> gnu/zebra et all.
> 
> I am looking for short- and long-term solutions, anything that's developed 
> trough sponsoring i'd be happy to contribute to the main tree.
> As this would be the first time we actually ask for a specific feature in 
> any OSS software, I could be way off the scale with the figures i had in 
> mind. This would be about 200 to 400 euro per feature, the more important 
> ones like STP and ECMP are totally open to discussion.
> 
> Any takers? Any enlightenment? Thanks for helping out in advance ;)

if_bridge has been imported into FreeBSD 6.0 and I believe will be
merged to 5.x before 5.5.

I can't speak for ECMP.

LACP is supported by ng_fec.  The fact that you don't like it is a
seperate issue.  FWIW, ng_fec only uses netgraph for configuration.
It's not really a netgraph node.  I'd personally like to see OpenBSD's
if_trunk imported and LACP added, but I certainly don't have time.

-- Brooks

-- 
Any statement of the form "X is the one, true Y" is FALSE.
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