new CARP implementation

Gleb Smirnoff glebius at freebsd.org
Mon Aug 15 12:07:53 UTC 2011


  Hi David and networkers,

On Sun, Aug 14, 2011 at 03:56:28PM -0500, David Duchscher wrote:
D> > On Sat, Aug 13, 2011 at 07:32:06PM -0500, David Duchscher wrote:
D> > D> My two cents.
D> > D> 
D> > D> We rely on the arp load balance feature.  We certainly don't find it useless.  Looking at ip load balancing, it would also mean that we would no longer be able to grow bandwidth with additional systems since all boxes must receive all traffic. I only humbling ask that some sort of load balancing feature be included when this goes live.
D> > 
D> > Ok, I will make effort to support it. I will inform when patch would
D> > be updated.
D> 
D> Thank you.

On closer look it appeared that restoring ARP balancing as it was, isn't going
to be easy. The essence of ARP balancing is that different vhids possess the
same IP address. Converting that to new scheme would mean that same IP prefixes
exist on one interface, which is impossible in current networking stack. And
making it possible would be a bloody hack.

So I'd prefer to settle current code a bit, commit it to head, after 9.0 is
forked and released... Test and settle code a bit more... And then work on
ARP and IP balancing. That would probably require bringing in some intermediate
structure along with struct carp_softc, that would group softcs into
balancing groups. That is already done in OpenBSD. Not sure that our balancing
would be compatible with OpenBSD's, however the current is not already, since
OpenBSD changed their hashing function after we merged carp(4) to FreeBSD.

-- 
Totus tuus, Glebius.


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