etherchannel on 5.2.1 - possible?

[Will Saxon]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: J.D. Bronson [mailto:jbronson at wixb.com]
> Sent: Monday, April 19, 2004 9:46 AM
> To: freebsd-performance at freebsd.org
> Cc: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> Subject: etherchannel on 5.2.1 - possible?
> 
> 
> I am looking for performance. Not fail-over..
> 
> Does anyone have this working with either
> intel or broadcom nics?
> 
> Anyone have any good site that talks about what is needed to 
> make this work
> as well? - I do have a Cisco switch and it fully supports this.
> 
> I need a little advice on setting this up...

I have used the ng_fec netgraph module with both broadcom 5703X and
HP NC7170 nics (uses em driver). 

This is how to set it up:

First you have to have the ng_fec module loaded.

Then,

# ngctl mkpeer fec dummy fec
# ngctl msg fec0: add_iface '"bge0"'
# ngctl msg fec0: add_iface '"bge1"'

Obviously replace bge with em or whatever other driver you are using.
ng_fec supports up to 4 links.

At this point, you will have a fec0 interface that you can 
manipulate normally with ifconfig. I have noticed that sometimes
I have to bring the interface up and down a couple of times to get
it to start passing traffic. Whenever you 'ifconfig up' or assign an
address to fec0 it resets the bundle. 

One thing that is annoying is that ng_fec doesn't work with vlans. There
is an ng_vlan module that was recently released, but ng_fec doesn't work
with it because it isn't quite like other netgraph modules. 

Almost all of my freebsd machines use vlans, so I am not making heavy 
use of ng_fec. We aren't pushing enough data to make it really necessary 
anyway.

There is also ng_one2many which does implement failover and channel 
bonding but not using the etherchannel technique. I think it uses
round robin. 

-Will