Subject: Re: bonding and SR-IOV -- do we need arp_validation for loadbalancing too?

From: Chris Friesen <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2012 10:15:45 -0600

On 07/27/2012 08:55 AM, Andy Gospodarek wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 03:38:11PM -0600, Chris Friesen wrote:

>> In our environment (ATCA shelf) the switches have been customized to
>> handle some of this stuff so arpmon does work reliably with xor.
> Good.
>
>> In the general case it sounds like the "PF bonding ignores packets
>> from VFs" is a better bet then.
> It really might be.  There are some registers in the 82599 datasheets
> that are not used by the ixgbe driver, but might help you in this area.
>
> If you take a look at PFVML2FLT and PFUTA and their current status on
> your system you might be able to put something together that gives you
> what you want.

I think it's simpler than that.  By my reading of the 82599 datasheet, 
the LB bit in the status field of the rx descriptor will indicate if the 
packet came from a VM.

> It would likely mean you have to run a custom ixgbe-driver, but that
> doesn't sound like much of an issue.

While I'd like to avoid it if possible, we've already had to tweak the 
driver for other things.

The complication is that we've got a few different types of hardware and 
they're not all running 82599.  I'm trying to figure out if the other 
hardware can do something similar.

Chris