Re: CFT: new trunk(4)

On Apr 12, 2007, at 2:09 PM, Andrew Thompson wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 12, 2007 at 07:39:00AM +0200, Ian FREISLICH wrote:
>> Peter Jeremy wrote:
>>> Trunking is a way of combining multiple physical interfaces to  
>>> increase
>>> the bandwidth.  Trunking multiple VLANs on a single interface  
>>> doesn't
>>> make sense to me.
>>
>> 802.1q is VLAN tagging and trunking.  This interface is LACP - link
>> aggregation.  I really think that it makes no sense to be able to
>> aggregate some ethernet interfaces and not others.  I suppose some
>> pedant will tell me vlan interfaces are not ethernet.
>
> I think the unfortunate name of trunk(4) that we inherited from  
> OpenBSD
> is causing quite some confusion.  trunk(4) actually has nothing to do
> with vlan trunking which I think you are after.

Yup.  The term "trunk" is overloaded and can used both in the sense  
of "trunk port", meaning a port on a switch which exposes the VLAN  
tags and is usually used to connect several VLANs between two  
switches (in contrast to an end-station port which only gets ethernet  
frames for the VLAN ID(s) assigned to that port), yet is also used by  
vendors like 3com in phrases like "trunk groups" or "port trunking",  
which means the same thing that Cisco means with FEC (ie, IEEE  
802.3ad or the LACP term mentioned above).

> I can see this topic coming up again so it could save some time to
> rename the driver now. It would mean that we lose the naming link  
> to the
> same driver in OpenBSD but you cant win em all.
>
> Some names that have been suggested are:
>
> linkag(4)
> agr(4)
> bond(4)   <- same as linux
>
> Any suggestions!

lacp(4)...?  bond(4) also seems OK, and perhaps is a more intuitive  
name; agr(4) strikes me as being too likely to be confused with some  
odd flavor of NIC or agpgart(4).

-- 
-Chuck