[Twg] LNet channel bounding

[Doug Oucharek]

Hi Alexey,

Thank you for posting your Channel Bonding proposal.  I'm Doug Oucharek and work on LNet at Whamcloud.  I have a few questions/comments:

1- I'm assuming you will be calling the LND "Bonding" rather than "Bounding".

2- I'm assuming that the bonding LND would pass the message on to one of the other LND's to be actually sent (i.e. passes to the socklnd when sending to a TCP channel).  This sort of breaks the architecture of a protocol layer which usually passes messages "down" the stack rather than laterally to another element in the same layer.  I assume this is being proposed as it will make the coding much easier.  Would it be much more difficult to put bonding support in LNet itself rather than having a separate LND?

3-There has been some work in LND's, particularly the qswlnd, to support multi-rail.  This could be a good template on how to get the bonding LND to manage multiple networks in the bond.

4- Can you provided more details on how the virtual NID's get converted to the actual NID's for the different networks in the bond?  Is all of this configured from module options or is there a configuration server involved (sort of like DNS, but for NID translation)?

5- What load balancing algorithms are being supported?  If a weighted mechanism will be used, how will that work?

Doug