Bonding infiniband interfaces

[Greg Rudd01]

Hi all

I am trying to bond two infiniband interfaces ib0 and ib1 but when I try to perform the bonding I get the following message:

ifup ibbond0
bonding device ibbond0 does not seem to be present, delaying initialization.

However when you do an lsmod you can see the module loaded into the kernel and is used to bond 2 ethernet cards

Or is it a case that this module can only be used to bond ethernet nics.

Kernel 2.6.9-22 using openinfiniband.org patches on RHEL 4 ES

[Lionel Giraudeau]

Hi Greg,

In my opinion, bonding two or more infiniband is impossible because it has not be designed for.
Infiniband is mainly used in HPC (Clustering) 'cause it gaves low ping which are mandatory for good performances.
Then I consider infiniband the same as interconnect in Tru64, I mean :
Each node or server connected to the interconnect network has only one interface.
If you want to have redundancy or if you want increasing performances, you must you a double rails configuration.
Then, two interfaces on each nodes/servers. One connected to the interconnect network A and the other connected to network B.
These two networks can be used at the same time for parallelization but the software have to deal with, not kernel or drivers.

Try searching for solution based on double infiniband rails instead of bonding these two interfaces.

Regards,
Lionel