Feature requests / inquiries.

[Max Laier]

On Monday 29 August 2005 19:50, Brooks Davis wrote:
> 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.

A candidate MFC patchset is at: 
http://people.freebsd.org/~thompsa/if_bridge-5stable.diff and is believed to 
be production quality (judging from the reports for RELENG_6 so far).  There 
might be minor problems and/or yet undiscovered problems, but only testing 
gets it there.  Andrew is certainly thankful for any feedback!

> 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.

It's certainly a good idea to look at if_trunk.  I don't have hardware to 
build a testbed, but I belive there are people out there who do and also have 
the skills to make it happen.  The main problem is: Whoever does this must 
have (physical) access to a reasonable testbed and free time while there 
(i.e. agreement with employer etc)

-- 
/"\  Best regards,                      | mlaier at freebsd.org
\ /  Max Laier                          | ICQ #67774661
 X   http://pf4freebsd.love2party.net/  | mlaier at EFnet
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