Subject: Re: BUG: bonding module can only be loaded once

From: Patrick McHardy <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 09 Jun 2009 18:27:14 +0200

Jay Vosburgh wrote:
> Patrick McHardy <[email-masked]> 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.