On Tuesday 02 November 2004 15:28, Martijn van Oosterhout wrote: > With all due respect, if your card has a problem receiving packets for > a particular IP, that your card/driver's problem. Are these errors > anything the user can do about? You're absolutely right. Normally the hardware should not care about IP addresses but just give us ethernet packets, so the stack can sort out. But unfortunately, this is a bit different on IBM zSeries mainframes. We have a virtualization layer at IP level. Several operating system images share one physical network card. Each OS registers its IP address with the card. Then the card gives received IP packets with this IP address to the respective OS image. So we _have_ to register IP addresses with our hardware; otherwise we never get our packets. This virtualization layer had been designed before Linux was ported to s390; therefore, we hit some problems every now and then. > Besides, if you have multiple network cards, you can still receive > connections for that IP from other network ports, so it'd be wrong to > have all them stop working just because your card is having an issue. There isn't a way to do it via a different interface, either. At least on s390. > I think the reason is that there is no reason why adding an IP should fail. > I imagine quite a few program don't check because realistically how > could it fail. The IP is a property of the network stack (fully > software) and thus can't fail. The hardware should not be an issue. > > What's the failure mode anyway? That's the big question. I thought about deregistering the IP address in the stack. A sort of a rollback of what inet_insert_ifa did. -- Regards, Thomas. - : send the line "unsubscribe linux-net" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
