Feature requests / inquiries.

From: Bart Van Kerckhove (bart_at_it-ss.be)
Date: 08/29/05

  • Next message: Brooks Davis: "Re: Feature requests / inquiries." 
    To: <freebsd-net@freebsd.org>, <freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org>
Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2005 17:56:25 +0200

    Dear Sirs / Fellow Freebsd Freaks,

    I've been using FreeBSD for a while now as a routing/firewalling platform,
    but recent developments in our network infrastructure confront me with some
    lack of features in the IPstack.
    In a nutshell, i'm looking for support for (in order of importance to me) :
    (r)STP, ECMP, and LACP.

    For STP, i have found a patch that contained a port from netbsd code of
    if_bridge ; but i'm way too insecure about running this on a production
    system.
    For ECMP, the only thing i found out was that there used to be a patchset
    that did something like it, but went defunct after 4.8.
    LACP: no idea at all, sorry :)

    As these are features we'll be using some time soon now, i can say we _need_
    them. I have even seriously considered moving to NetBSD; the lack of NIC
    polling support for the intel chipsets i'm using is holding me back at the
    moment.
    I do not want to move over to linux, for various reasons.
    So I figured perhaps some of the freebsd community is also interested in
    these features, and I might as well sponsor (part of?) its development.
    Are there any persons interested in developing these features, or do they
    already exist and am I just plain ignorant (forgive me if that is the case).
    Please note that i'm not interested in the netgraph approach, as that's
    (imho) just a hack around it, and it's not functioning with for example
    gnu/zebra et all.

    I am looking for short- and long-term solutions, anything that's developed
    trough sponsoring i'd be happy to contribute to the main tree.
    As this would be the first time we actually ask for a specific feature in
    any OSS software, I could be way off the scale with the figures i had in
    mind. This would be about 200 to 400 euro per feature, the more important
    ones like STP and ECMP are totally open to discussion.

    Any takers? Any enlightenment? Thanks for helping out in advance ;)

    Met vriendelijke groet / With kind regards,

    Bart Van Kerckhove
    bart@it-ss.be

  • Next message: Brooks Davis: "Re: Feature requests / inquiries."

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