On Sun, 2004-11-07 at 16:10, Christopher Schultz wrote:
> All,
> 
> >> On the subject of networking, does anyone know if it's possible to
> >>  combine the two NICs to one IP to allow link aggregation, ie a
> >> single IP with double the bandwidth?
> > 
> > This _would_ be rather nice to know.....
> 
> I believe that the Linux kernel comes with an optional driver to do this
> kind of thing. I wouldn't be suprised if it's in the NetBSD kernel
> somewhere. If not, some enterprising kernel hacker can use the Linux
> code as a starting point.

The Linux bonding driver handles this, called Etherchannel in
Cisco-space and by various names for other vendors. I think there's an
802.mumble name for it too.

AFAICT NetBSD doesn't have this capability. I searched a while ago to
see if I could get all of the ports on a Sun quad-ethernet card to talk
to a Cisco switch and all I could find was someone who either had a
basic (read: not committed to tree) implementation of it, or was going
to write one, and this was all dated a long time ago.

I'd be sceptical that combining two tulip NICs with below-par
performance on the Cobalt hardware is going to magically double the
throughput, if the interconnecting PCI bus is the limiting factor. As I
understood it to work, you don't double the bandwidth between two single
machines anyway.

Matt