Re: Inclusive terminology (instead of master/slave) for network bonding/LACP
Hi,
On Thu, Feb 22, 2024 at 11:19:16AM +0100, Ralph Aichinger wrote:
> I know this is a loaded topic. I really don't want to discuss the
> political aspects of the "why", but just want to know the facts, i.e.
> how far this has been progressed in Debian.
As Debian is not itself upstream for most of the software it
distributes, it is going to rely on upstream projects to make these
changes. I am not aware of any coordinated effort in Debian to find
instances of this terminology and propose changes upstream.
That sort of project-wide consensus is hard to achieve in Debian
(even on non-controversial topics) so I wouldn't be surprised if
Debian Developers who are interested in this would not get further
by just proposing the changes to upstream projects themselves as
individuals.
So then, if you spot such terminology in use somewhere there is
nothing stopping you from having a look at their issue tracker to
see if there is already an issue in place about that and possibly
propose changes yourself.
> Is there anything planned to get "master/slave" terminology out of
> network bonding/LACP in Debian (or Linux kernel or whoever decides
> this terminology)?
The Ethernet bonding driver is a kernel module. It is quite old
(decades) and hasn't seen much development recently, I think because
it is generally considered complete.
There has been a replacement/successor for the Ethernet bonding
driver for some time — the teaming driver — which does away with the
older terminology as well as providing a few other improvements:
https://libteam.org/
However I must confess that despite having bonded Ethernets on all
my works servers (with ifenslave for userland control) I personally
have never spent the time to convert to libteam and I rarely see
other examples of people having done so.
I think possibly a reason for this is that the Ethernet bonding
driver was considered complete a long time ago and the purely
technical improvements of the teaming driver are quite small or
niche, so few people see the need to change. I have used the bonding
driver since before the teaming driver existed, so there's been some
inertia against me learning a new thing.
It would be good to see more use and examples for libteam to help
people like me¹ feel more confident in switching.
If you proceed with it, how about making a page on the Debian
wiki?
Thanks,
Andy
¹ Although in my specific case we are actually in the middle of
switching to a BGP architecture where each server BGP peers and
all traffic is routed at layer 3, not switched at layer 2. Each
server's individual Ethernet interfaces are being broken out and
bonding will not be used at all any more. The redundancy of
network will come from BGP.
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