Re: BUG: bonding module can only be loaded once

From: Patrick McHardy
Date: Tue Jun 09 2009 - 12:27:30 EST


Jay Vosburgh wrote:
Patrick McHardy <kaber@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In any case, this is not the first time this has been broken and the
fundamental reason is in my opinion that the bonding interface is
broken to begin with. The module aliasing thing is complete crap
and should have been phased out long ago. At this point its probably
not worth anymore to migrate people to the sysfs interface though,
the best thing would be to add an rtnl_link interface and phase out
both.

The "load bonding multiple times" stuff is only there now for
backwards compatibility with old distro initscripts / sysconfig packages
that don't configure bonding through sysfs (a sysfs API was added to
bonding three or four years ago).

All of the current distro releases I'm aware of use sysfs to
configure bonding, and have done so for at least a year or two. I
haven't done an exhaustive survey, but it seems unlikely that users are
running a current up to date kernel with a two or three year old
initscripts / sysconfig package. Anybody have information to the
contrary?

I'd expect its not the distros, but rather the applicances which might
still be using this. I know a vendor I used to work for a couple of
years ago just recently made the switch from 2.6.16 to a current kernel,
and I'd expect that they are still using this (I can find out tommorrow
if you want to know for sure). Vyatta likewise, I guess.

If nobody has any heartburn at dropping support for multiple
bonding instances on old distros, I'm as happy as anybody to remove all
of the multiple load logic from bonding. There's been plenty of time
for transitioning from "multiple load" to sysfs.

In my opinion it would need a feature-removal-schedule announcement.
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/