[Bridge] RSTP in http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/shemminger/rstp.git; a=summary problems

Srinivas M.A. srinivas.aji at gmail.com
Sun Mar 30 12:13:01 PDT 2008


>  > One limitation
>  > is that there is no mechanism to automatically restart or fall back to
>  > kernel STP if the RSTP
>  > daemon crashes. But it hasn't crashed lately in our testing.
>
>  Should be fixable, just vfork and wait for an abnormal exit status,
>  reset state and vfork again.

Yes, doable, not yet done though.

>  hmm, how does stp_state become 2? Do I need a new kernel(on 2.6.23 now)?

>  Don't follow, why do I need a bridge-stp at all? Seem like I should
>  just start rstpd and config my bridge normally?

2.6.23 has all the kernel stuff needed.

The way things happen is this:

When you do "brctl stp <bridge_name> on", the kernel runs
"/sbin/bridge-stp <bridge_name> start" and waits for the exit code. If
the exit code is 0, the kernel sets stp_state to 2, and assumes that
userspace will take care of STP and does not do any STP actions. (This
state is different from STP disabled, since during STP disabled, the
kernel still brings up ports from learning to forwarding using a
timeout, and also, the bridge forwards BPDUs too in that state.) If
the exit code is non-zero, stp_state is set to 1 and kernel STP is
activated.

So you need to:
1. Start rstpd
2. Have a bridge-stp script that returns success
3. Configure your bridge. (Here, because of the event mechanism
currently available, it is best to do "brctl stp <bridge_name> on"
before doing "ifconfig <bridge_name> up")

> I do this
> ./rstpd
> brctl addbr br0
> brctl addif br0 eth0
> brctl stp br0 on
> ifconfig eth0 0.0.0.0 up
> ifconfig br0  0.0.0.0 up
> ./rstpctl showbridge

> It does not get enabled and
> #> cat /sys/class/net/br0/bridge/stp_state
> 1

This should have worked. Could you check that /sbin/bridge-stp has
execute bit set and is getting run? It doesn't have stdout, etc, so
you need to log messages to a file to see what is happening. e.g.
(date; echo $0 "$@") >>/tmp/bridge-stp.log

Also, rstp will log to syslog. To see lots more messages, you can do
"rstpctl debuglevel 4", but since we are doing
(main.c) vsyslog((level <= LOG_LEVEL_INFO) ? LOG_INFO : LOG_DEBUG, ....
you need to configure your syslog to log the LOG_DEBUG messages as
well to see them, or just fix the code to get all the messages at
LOG_INFO.

> Have this code been tested on a big endian CPU?

No, only ix86 and x86_64 at the moment. At least in the RSTP logic
itself (rstp.[ch]), I seem to have taken some care to use bytes
directly for the on-the-wire structures and convert to and from
numbers using arithmetic, which should be endian independent. I don't
see any obviously little endian specific code in the other parts
either. The rstpctl program relies on structures having the same
binary layout in it as well as in rstpd, but that should not be
affected by endianness.

In any case, see if you can get the bridge-stp thing working to the
point where you see stp_state as 2. If you see issues past that, like
received BPDU's not being recognized, or anything else seeming
endianness related, I will set up a qemu powerpc image and test.

Thanks.


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