[BUG] Issue with bonding over Broadcom (bnx2) cards using vlan

Issue with bonding over Broadcom (bnx2) cards using vlan

Issue:

Network appears to be up, though the system is unreachable.

Environment:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3
• kernel-2.6.32-279.el6
• Multiple Broadcom bnx2 network interfaces
• Interfaces configured into a bond with VLAN subinterfaces

Resolution:

This has been resolved in RHEL 6.3 z-stream kernel package kernel-2.6.32-279.2.1.el6 under Red Hat Bugzilla 837227.

This update can be obtained with the yum command, or via errata release RHBA-2012-1104.

Root cause:

The bonding method for adding VLAN Identifiers (VIDs) did not always add the VID to a slave VLAN group. When the NETIF_F_HW_VLAN_FILTER flag was not set on a slave, the bonding module could not add new VIDs to it. This could cause networking problems and the system to be unreachable even if NIC messages did not indicate any problems. Updated kernel kernel-2.6.32-279.2.1.el6 has a fix that changes the bond VID add path to always add a new VID to the slaves (if the VID does not exist). This ensures that networking problems no longer occur in this scenario.

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