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goscickiw
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Does RB5009 bonding hardware offloading work or not?

Fri Mar 24, 2023 9:43 am

We have a RB5009 with a balance-xor two port bonding interface configured as a VLAN trunk to a TP-Link switch. It works as expected, but one thing surprised me.
According to the wiki, some CRS and CCR devices support bonding hardware offloading, but I can't find any information that the RB5009 also does. However the "H" indicator also appears on our RB5009's bonding interface in bridge ports.
#    INTERFACE      BRIDGE       HW   PVID  PRIORITY  PATH-COST  INTERNAL-PATH-COST  HORIZON
4  H lag2-SWITCH    bridge-main  yes     1  0x80             10                  10  none
So does the RB5009 actually support bonding hardware offloading, or is this a bug? Or should I look elsewhere for the hardware offloading indicator for bonding interfaces?
 
AidanAus
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Re: Does RB5009 bonding hardware offloading work or not?

Mon Apr 03, 2023 8:27 am

Doesnt looks like it shares the same switch chip with the CRS's and ccr2116/2216 that has this enabled and the wiki/help doesnt mention it so I would suggest it is not 'hardware offloading' the bonding traffic: https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/display/ ... p+Features

For your questions about the H, that will show up if you have enabled hardware offloading as well as the right conditions are met (1st bridge for that switch chip etc) and will only hardware offload what is it capable of.

For instance if you set up vlan configuration on a hap ax2 under the bridge/port and bridge/vlans menus this will not be hardware offloaded as the device or switch chip is not able to do so, it will still have the H however as it is able to still do port switching through the switch chip/hardware offloading.


Hopefully that clears up your question a little bit further :)
 
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goscickiw
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Re: Does RB5009 bonding hardware offloading work or not?

Mon Apr 10, 2023 10:14 pm

For instance if you set up vlan configuration on a hap ax2 under the bridge/port and bridge/vlans menus this will not be hardware offloaded as the device or switch chip is not able to do so, it will still have the H however as it is able to still do port switching through the switch chip/hardware offloading.
Would the H really appear in this case though? I have a hEX at home, and after setting up bridge VLAN filtering the H did not appear, at least not until updating from RouterOS v6.49.7 to v7.6, as that feature was enabled on hEX in 7.1rc1. Also the H doesn't appear on a Wi-Fi interface added to the bridge on my hAP ac2 (presumably because it's connected directly to the CPU rather than the switch chip), but appears on individual ethernet ports.

Also after setting the bonding interface on my home hEX exactly as on the office RB5009 and adding it to the bridge, the H does not appear on that interface (appears normally on other individual ports). So if the H doesn't indicate bonding hardware offloading, then what does it indicate in this case that wouldn't be hardware offloaded on this interface on hEX but would on RB5009? VLAN filtering is also configured on both devices but other than that all L2 stuff is pretty much default.
Normally I don't use bonding on my home hEX as it doesn't make sense there, but in the office traffic from multiple devices to multiple other devices has to go through the RB5009. I'm concerned if the lack of bonding hardware offloading would mean that the traffic on the same VLAN between the bonding interfaces would have to go through and take up bandwidth on the internal 10Gbit link between the switch chip and CPU, rather than staying at the switch chip and allowing full bandwidth through the internal link for the traffic that actually has to go through the CPU for routing between networks/VLANs.
 
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mkx
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Re: Does RB5009 bonding hardware offloading work or not?

Tue Apr 11, 2023 11:44 am

Would the H really appear in this case though?
Yes, it would. The meaning of flag "H" is exactly to show when operations on certain port are offloaded to hardware. If state of flag is not in sync with actual operation, it's a bug. But I don't remember a report when HW offload was active, but "H" flag was not shown.
And, your observations on hEX and hAP ac2 are expected (as are your assumptions).

Also after setting the bonding interface on my home hEX exactly as on the office RB5009 and adding it to the bridge, the H does not appear on that interface
That's because hEX doesn't support bonding in HW (read this article, it has a part explaining HW offload support). It seems that RB5009 is in the same boat (for now). So yes, if you use bonding on RB5009, that means all traffic between bond and the rest of ports will have to pass switch-CPU interconnect and will have to be dealt with by CPU. Since RB5009 has a pretty powerful CPU, it might even support throughputs higher than speed of individual bond link (i.e. more than 1Gbps), but devices with slower CPUs (such as hEX) would struggle (if not choke the switch-CPU interconnect) and there's no sense in having bonds other than for redundancy reasons (for which something based on xSTP might make more sense performance wise).
 
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Re: Does RB5009 bonding hardware offloading work or not?  [SOLVED]

Wed Apr 12, 2023 4:54 am

according to documentation its supports

Bridge Hardware Offloading
https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/display/ ... Offloading

beware of this:
Only 802.3ad and balance-xor modes can be HW offloaded. Other bonding modes do not support HW offloading.

be sure of using Bridge VLAN Filtering style configuration
 
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goscickiw
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Re: Does RB5009 bonding hardware offloading work or not?

Wed Apr 12, 2023 8:24 am

according to documentation its supports

Bridge Hardware Offloading
https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/display/ ... Offloading

beware of this:
Only 802.3ad and balance-xor modes can be HW offloaded. Other bonding modes do not support HW offloading.

be sure of using Bridge VLAN Filtering style configuration
Thanks, I didn't notice that table before. Looks like the RB5009's 88E6393X switch chip is on it and marked as supporting bonding HW offload. The hEX's MT7621 is also there and marked as not supporting, so my observations match this.

Also, yes, currently we're not using anything other than balance-xor. We also have a device that supports 802.3ad, but isn't utilized yet.

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