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bonding: Doesn't support IPv6

John netdev 1 version In review

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  1. v1 Latest2 patches 3 repliesIn review

Patches in v1 No applies recorded yet

#Subject and filesSizeRepliesApplied
1/2bonding: Doesn't support IPv6drivers/net/bonding/bond_main.c+41 -123 replies
2/2bonding: Doesn't support IPv6Documentation/networking/bonding.txt+26 -50 replies

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Cover letter [PATCH 0/2] bonding: Doesn't support IPv6

Currently the "bonding" driver does not support load balancing outgoing traffic in LACP mode for IPv6 traffic. IPv4 (and TCP or UDP over IPv4) are currently supported; this patch adds transmit hashing for IPv6 (and TCP or UDP over IPv6), bringing IPv6 up to par with IPv4 support in the bonding driver.

The algorithm chosen (xor'ing the bottom three quads and then xor'ing that down into the bottom byte) was chosen after testing almost 400,000 unique IPv6 addresses harvested from server logs. This algorithm had the most even distribution for both big- and little-endian architectures while still using few instructions.

Fragmented IPv6 packets are handled the same way as fragmented IPv4 packets, ie, they are not balanced based on layer 4 information. Additionally, IPv6 packets with intermediate headers are not balanced based on layer 4 information. In practice these intermediate headers are rare and this should not cause any problems, the alternative (a packet-parsing loop and look-up table) seemed slow and complicated for little gain.

This is an update to a prior patch I submitted. This version includes bounds checking not present in the original driver or my prior patch. Included with the patch is an update to the bonding documentation.

Patch has been tested and performs as expected.

John