Re: Ethernet load balancing (was: Re: 3.0 wishlist Was: Overview of 2.2.x goals?)

John Carol Langford (jcl@gs176.sp.cs.cmu.edu)
Tue, 20 Jan 1998 09:55:41 -0500

>I must be missing something here (again :-) ... why is
>it not possible to write a special net device which just
>distributes packets equally to two real net devices?

This is what eql (for serial devices) and ipeql (more generically) try to
do.

>Sounds like it would just be a very thin layer. As long

It's not thin because the route cache holds the (dummy) header for the
software device. The real header for the slave device has to be
reconstructed on each packet, increasing the effective network stack depth
by 50% or so.

-John Langford