[Techtalk] problem with the linux bonding driver

Carla Schroder carla at bratgrrl.com
Thu Aug 30 00:31:25 UTC 2007


I'm having some issues trying to get mode 6 working with the Linux bonding 
driver. One of the preliminary steps is querying your NICs with ethtool. One 
NIC is an Admtek NC100 rev. 11, which uses the tulip driver. I thought tulip 
supported ethtool, but I get this:

# ethtool eth0
Settings for eth0:
No data available

The other NIC is via_rhine, which supports ethtool:

# ethtool eth1
Settings for eth1:
        Supported ports: [ TP MII ]
        Supported link modes:   10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full
                                100baseT/Half 100baseT/
<snip>

As far as I know, the tulip driver should work for mode 6, or balance-alb, but 
all I get are error messages. Here are the steps I followed:

# modprobe bonding mode=balance-alb miimon=100
# ifconfig bond0 192.168.1.101 netmask 255.255.255.0 up
# ifenslave bond0 eth0 eth1
Master 'bond0', Slave 'eth0': Error: Enslave failed
Master 'bond0', Slave 'eth1': Error: Enslave failed

Both interfaces are down and not configured before running the commands.

I haven't had much luck googling, and the bonding driver mailing list is 95% 
spam. The best doc I've found is 
http://www.mjmwired.net/kernel/Documentation/networking/bonding.txt. This 
says:

" Prerequisites:
 1. Ethtool support in the base drivers for retrieving
     the speed of each slave.
 
 2. Base driver support for setting the hardware
   address of a device while it is open."

dmesg says, with snippage:

"bonding: bond0: Error: dev_set_mac_address of dev eth0 failed! ALB mode 
requires that the base driver support setting the hw address also when the 
network device's interface is open

tulip_stop_rxtx() failed (CSR5 0xfc06c012 CSR6 0xff970115)

bond0: Error: dev_set_mac_address of dev eth1 failed! ALB mode requires that 
the base driver support setting the hw address also when the network device's 
interface is open"

The obvious conclusion is that neither tulip nor via_rhine support setting the 
hw address also when the network device's interface is open, and that tulip 
does not support ethtool. But I'm not convinced this is the problem, as they 
are very common drivers, and as far as I can tell from googling some people 
do have them working with this.

Any bright ideas?


-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Carla Schroder
Linux geek and random computer tamer
check out my Linux Cookbook! 
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/linuxckbk/
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