Re: [dpdk-users] active_backup link bonding and mac address

[Declan Doherty <declan.doherty@intel.com>]

On 12/05/2017 4:34 PM, Kyle Larose wrote:
>
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Declan Doherty [mailto:declan.doherty@intel.com]
>> Sent: Friday, May 12, 2017 10:56 AM
>> To: Kyle Larose; users@dpdk.org; dev@dpdk.org
>> Subject: Re: active_backup link bonding and mac address
>>
>> On 12/05/2017 3:31 PM, Kyle Larose wrote:
>>> I'm adding the dev mailing list/link bonding maintainer, because I've done
>> some more investigation and I'm beginning to think something is wrong.
>>>
>>
>> Kyle, sorry I didn't see the post in the users list. I think the issue is
>> that the new primary is missing the bond MAC address on it's valid MACs
>> list, hence it is dropping the ingress packets after a fail-over event,
>> placing the all the slave devices into promiscuous mode as you suggest in
>> option 2 would probably make the issue go away but I don't think it's the
>> correct solution. I think we should just be adding the bond MAC to each
>> slaves devices valid MAC list. As only one bond slave is only active at any
>> time this won't cause any issues to the network, and will mean that fail
>> over is transparent to your application and there is no need for MAC
>> rewrites, which would invalidate existing ARP table entries at downstream
>> end points.
>
> Hey Declan,
>
> Thanks for the prompt response.
>
> I agree with your suggestion. Does this MAC list propagate to the slave NICs' hardware layers?
> That is, even if a slave isn't in promiscuous mode, if it receives a frame addressed to any
> MAC in its list, it will accept it and deliver it to the software? Or, does it mean we need to
> put the slave into promiscuous mode, but filter any MACs not in its list (unless the bond
> interface itself is in promiscuous mode)?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Kyle
>

Yes it would be into the hw tables, rte_eth_dev_mac_addr_add() on each 
slave port should achieve this, so there will be no need to run in 
promiscuous mode. I'll try and setup a test for this on Monday morning 
in our lab.

Declan