Bonding, Link Aggregation and Failover

Bonding (also known as teaming) allows for improved reliability and increased bandwidth by combining physical ports from one or more network adapters into a bond. A bond has a single IP address, single MAC address and functions as a single port or single adapter to provide redundancy.

Onload monitors the OS configuration of the standard kernel bonding module and accelerates traffic over bonds that are detected as suitable (see limitations). As a result no special configuration is required to accelerate traffic over bonded interfaces.

For example, to configure an 802.3ad bond of two SFC interfaces (eth2 and eth3):

modprobe bonding miimon=100 mode=4 xmit_hash_policy=layer3+4
ifconfig bond0 up

Interfaces must be down before adding to the bond.

echo +eth2 > /sys/class/net/bond0/bonding/slaves
echo +eth3 > /sys/class/net/bond0/bonding/slaves
ifconfig bond0 192.168.1.1/24

The file /var/log/messages should then contain a line similar to:

[onload] Accelerating bond0 using Onload

Traffic over this interface will then be accelerated by Onload.