[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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