Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 30 Apr 1999 12:18:57 +0930 | From | Glen Turner <> | Subject | Re: fast EtherChannel support? |
| |
Alan Cox wrote: > > > Anybody know if fast etherchannel support is available for Linux? This is > > the Cisco protocol where two to four ethernet interfaces can be bound > > together as one logical high-speed interface. > > Ask cisco for the protocol 8)
I did. Last time Cisco's switching product manager was in Australia I asked for the Cisco ISL (ie: VLAN) and etherchannel protocol specs.
The ISL encoding spec is public, the spec for their VTP control protocol is not. I asked why not and basically their legal people want to tie up patents first. I asked would the free software community get a free license to the patents, he said yes.
Of course, none of this is too relevant, as anyone in their right mind would use IEEE rather than Cisco VLANs. Then again, implementing both IEEE and ISL VLANs would force a suitable degree of abstraction into any ethernet VLAN code.
Also, in the tradition of "a 486 is a terrible thing to waste" you can pick up ISL-only switches pretty cheaply second-hand.
The EtherChannel encoding is:
> Our algorithm (currently) is > (destination_ethernet_address AND 000.0000.0003) XOR > (source_ethernet_address AND 0000.0000.0003)
You then round-robin the resulting eight values through however many ports are in the channel.
The scheme has a few flaws, but remember that it was designed for hardware implementation and modulo prime schemes use lots of silicon.
No traffic policing is done on received packets. So in practice, EtherChannel will happily interwork with other hashing schemes.
Cisco does have a control protocol for EtherChannel, mainly to allow autoconfiguration and self-healing on links that show carrier but are actually broken (as usually happens when you insert some 100BaseTX/100BaseFX repeaters).
This protocol is not available to the public. It has been licensed to other companies. I moaned long and hard about this. I'll try again next time we meet, as whatever one thinks about the phrase `open source', it is currently trendy in board rooms, so they might be aggreable to a pitch that results in a media release "Cisco helps open source community".
Again, you don't need this protocol to do enough output hashing to interoperate. Linux could establish its own hashing scheme and happily co-work with EtherChannel switches. It's just that the port allocation on the switch needs to be done manually. Not a big deal.
BTW, I found the Cisco people I dealt with to be as helpful as they could be, given their position in the company. They all realised the strategic value of free implementations of protocols that are going to be munged into standards one day.
For protocols for which there will be no standard, they still act pretty much the same as other companies. EIGRP being the obvious example. So use OSPF instead :-)
-- Glen Turner Network Specialist Tel: (08) 8303 3936 Information Technology Services Fax: (08) 8303 4400 The University of Adelaide 5005 Email: glen.turner@adelaide.edu.au South Australia
- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
| |