Subject: Re: Problem with VLANs and via-velocity driver

From: Kevin Shanahan <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 2009 11:27:50 +1030

On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 07:40:39AM +0100, Patrick McHardy wrote:
> Kevin Shanahan wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I've had some problems with getting a fairly simple (I thought) VLAN
> > configuration working with the on board Via NICs on my Via M700
> > board. Looks like as soon as a tagged VLAN interface is added, the
> > underlying "raw" (untagged) interface stops responding.
> > 
> > ...
> > 
> > A bit of searching found a few references to similar problems going
> > back a few years (2005, 2007). Sounded like there were some driver
> > issues, but it wasn't clear from the messages I found whether they
> > were believed to be fixed or not. I tried the same test using a
> > differnt NIC with the tg3 driver and there were no problems, so it
> > looks to me like it's still a via-velocity issue. Unfortunately I
> > don't have room to add NICs to this machine and need to use the on
> > board Via hardware.
> 
> There's some special-casing for VID 0 in velocity_init_cam_filter().
> Does "ip link add link eth0 type vlan id 0" make any difference?

Thanks Patrick, this command got the untagged interface working again
(eth1 in my case). I can use this as a work around.

I didn't really understand if there was a good reason for the
special-casing in this driver, but from at least from my user
perspective I think it would be better if the drivers were consistent
in how they handle this.

Regards,
Kevin Shanahan.