On Mon, 2003-08-11 at 10:20, Shmulik Hen wrote:
> On Monday 11 August 2003 05:07 pm, Laurent DENIEL wrote:
> > HP/Compaq/Digital used to have the same approach with their Netrain
> > implementation, and from one release of Tru64 UNIX to another, they
> > could no longer support resolution ala milli-seconds but only
> > seconds due to the move of such "richness" to user space (among
> > other things). I am not saying that doing so on Linux will result
> > to the same, but a minimal failover policy shall remain in the
> > kernel for performance reason ... (or a user space facility could
> > exist to *configure* such policy but without direct interaction
> > with user space when the kernel has to decide).
> >
> > Laurent
>
> That was my point. Thank you for putting it into better words.
> If high availbilty and fast failovers are what's needed, why move it
> out of kernel space and put it in an application ? How fast could it
> work compared to a kernel module ? Why need an extra piece of code
> running in user space (daemon?) to monitor a module when the module
> can do that itself ?
>
> If smarter behavior is needed (e.g. falling to eth4 instead of eth1
> when eth0 fails), we can add some priority mechanism to the driver to
> do that when it decides to swap. Otherwise, we'll be devleoping
> applications from now on, not the Linux kernel :)
>
So how many smart things are you going to add to the driver? ;->
Do you wanna add the qos policy changeover as well? What about route
changes, firewalling etc. What about sliceing bread and adding butter?
Where do you draw the line?
BTW, I dont understand why it would slow down failover; sure it will a
tiny bit because you have to cross user space to lookup the policy.
Maybe this is the part that i havent made clear, heres an example:
- User space gets notified link eth0 went down
- User space looks up a policy config on what to do when eth0 goes down
- user space executes commands which may include telling kernel to
move activity to eth1.
Note: I agree on a minimal failover policy staying in the kernel; very
basic stuff like what bonding used to do (may still do, dont know).
cheers,
jamal
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