oxidecomputer / oxidecomputer/dendrite

mac allocation policy prevents multiple links on rear ports

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Dominant language
Rust
Stars
20
Forks
3
Avg merge
3d 11h
Merged PRs (30d)
4

Description

Originally filed as https://github.com/oxidecomputer/dendrite-archived/issues/669

We have a static policy for assigning MAC addresses to links on a switch. 32 MACs are reserved for rear ports and 128 for front ports. This lets us create up to 4 links on each QSFP/front port, but only a single link on each of the rear ports.

For production/customer installations, this assignment is fine. There is no reason to have more than a single link for each rear port in those scenarios. For diagnostic and/or bringup work, we may want to create up to one link for each lane on a rear port.

There are two fairly straightforward approaches to handling this. 1) we can add a "dynamic mac allocation" dpd flag, which would do dynamic mac allocation rather than static. 2) we can use the currently unassigned 95 MACs at the end of the block as an overflow pool.

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First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

No files, tests, or entry points are named in the issue. Start by tracing the static MAC assignment policy and its dpd configuration, then compare dynamic allocation with using the unassigned overflow pool. Done means diagnostic or bringup setups can create one link per lane on a rear port while production allocation remains unchanged.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
rust
Domain
networking
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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