OpenSolaris

Crossbow flag day

Date: Thu, 04 Dec 2008 22:02:52 -0800
From: Kais Belgaied <Kais.Belgaied at sun dot com>
To: onnv-gate at onnv dot eng dot sun dot com
Subject: Crossbow flag day

The integration of
	PSARC/2006/357 Crossbow - Network Virtualization and Resource Management
	6498311 Crossbow - Network Virtualization and Resource Management

constitutes a cap-eye Install and bfu flag day.
It is also a flag day for VLAN users.

Cap-I install will not work. Bfu is needed once to install a complete ON wos on the
system.
If your system has no VLANs created using the old PPA hack, then
you can skip to the Crossbow features overview section.

Crossbow removed the support of the PPA hack for creating VLANs.
You need to explicitly create the VLAN interface once first,
using dladm create-{vlan, vnic -v}.
Command such as ifconfig bge1000 will fail with a message
"ifconfig: status: SIOCGLIFFLAGS: bge1000: no such interface"
Adding /etc/hostname[6].bge1000 will not result in creating a VLAN interface
called bge1000 during boot time, or when svc:/network/physical:default is
restarted.
Similarly, setting the net physical property to  bge1000 for a zone with an
exclusive IP stack will not automatically create the bge1000 VLAN interface
in the zone. The VLAN interface needs to be created in the global
zone first.
The bfu script have been update to automatically convert the VLAN interfaces
created using the deprecated method in /etc/hostname* and zones.

Features Overview
Crossbow provides the building blocks for network virtualization and resource
control by creating virtual stacks around any service (HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, NFS,
etc.), protocol (TCP, UDP, SCTP, etc.), or Virtual machine (Containers and
(Xen and LDom based hypervisor xVM virtual machines).
This first push of the project introduces the following features:
- A Virtualized MAC layer offering:
	. Hardware and software based VNICs
	. virtual switching in MAC
	. etherstubs
        . MAC client API

- Flows
	. User defined flows based on Services, Protocols, Subnets, IP addresses

- Resource Control
	. Bandwidth limits and priorities for data-links and flows.
	. Hardware resource allocation (TX and RX rings, interrupts, CPUs) for
	  data-links.

- Observability for Data-links and Flows
	. Real time usage monitoring
	. Usage history gathering and reporting.

- Management tools
	. Extensions to dladm(1m) for manipulating VNICs, etherstubs, and
	  resource controls for all datalinks.
	. flowadm(1m), a new command for manipulating and managing resource
	  controls for flows.

Contacts.
	crossbow-discuss at opensolaris dot org is the project's external
	forum. crossbow-core at sun dot com is the internal mailing list.

	network/{dladm,flowadm}, kernel/{gld,tcp-ip} and library/libdladm are
	the bugster cat/subcat for gugs and RFEs related to Crossbow.