The compute-side backstop of the controller's duplicate-port guard
(keep-port-links + live-port bind made the controller guard reliable;
this is the layer under it). IOU and Dynamips bound the adapter NIO
before the uBridge/hypervisor attach: a failed attach left the port's
binding replaced — the link that still owned the port lost its handle
and its host state leaked (the IOU EBUSY incident's 8 orphan TAPs).
Dynamips was worse: its wiring idempotence check silently skipped the
attach on a second binding and rebound only the bookkeeping. A port
that already carries an NIO is now refused, and both types bind the
NIO only after the wiring succeeded.
The Ethernet switch's kernel fast path: instead of a link crossing the
switch's per-port uBridge relay, the switch absorbs the peer's anchor into
its own kernel bridge. The peer's interface (Docker veth host end, QEMU
TAP, IOU port TAP, Dynamips port TAP) becomes the switch port, and frames
cross anchor -> switch bridge -> switch ports entirely in the kernel.
Wire format: the switch end receives nio_anchor ('join this interface to
my own bridge' — the mirror of nio_bridge), the peer end nio_bridge with a
null bridge ('your anchor is bridged elsewhere': carrier, markers and
impairments only — never bridge membership, and never a bridge delete, on
an interface this node does not own). Anchor names come from the shared
naming contract (utils.kernel_anchor), a pure function of node type, id,
adapter and port — the controller computes the peer's anchor while the
node may be stopped, which is what makes links to stopped nodes wireable.
Stopped peers defer the join; after any node of a link starts
(UDPLink.node_started) the controller re-pushes the switch NIO, and the
switch completes — or repairs, when a peer restart replaced its interface
under the same name — the join against the kernel's actual membership
instead of assuming it.
VLAN changes now edit membership in place: only the ports whose mode/VLAN
actually changed are touched, each losing exactly the previous mode's
entries the new mode does not want (the dot1q admits-all entry is one
range operation in both directions), and no port ever leaves the bridge to
change its VLANs. This replaces the old 'reset by re-enslaving' shortcut
(delif+addif on every wired port, added when the ports were the switch's
own TAPs): on absorbed anchors, re-enslaving an interface owned by another
node is where live testing watched links die — anchors occasionally lost
their bridge membership right after a ports_mapping update (later updates
then failed with delif EINVAL), reproducibly with qemu, IOU and Dynamips
peers and never with Docker's veths.
Eligibility: the switch side needs no capability of its own (its bridge
exists by construction); the peer must be able to anchor. Switch-to-switch
cascades stay on the relay — a kernel interface belongs to one bridge, and
joining two bridges needs a veth pair, deferred.
Verified live on a real server: qemu peers through four VLAN cycles with
both anchors enslaved throughout; a mixed switch (2 IOU + 2 Dynamips, four
kernel ports); Docker peers with real ICMP isolating and recovering (with
both anchors still enslaved); VPCS relay ports likewise in place.
Dynamips links can now ride the kernel datapath like Docker, QEMU and IOU:
each Ethernet slot/port gets a persistent TAP anchor (gd{id}e{slot}p{port}),
created through uBridge's tap module, and the Dynamips hypervisor opens it
with nio create_tap — the hypervisor holds the fd, exactly QEMU's shape.
Links attach the anchor to their per-link kernel bridge; the legacy UDP
tunnel remains the relay datapath for every other port.
Anchor lifecycle: born at node start (tap module probed with one
create/delete cycle, sweep of stale devices, ownership handed to the server
user, born down); a kernel link opens the anchor in the hypervisor, binds
the slot/port and enslaves it; removing the link releases the fd again
(nio delete) and detaches. A link bound while the router is stopped is
wired by the next start (deferred wiring). Node close follows QEMU's stop
order — the hypervisor's TAP NIOs go before tap delete, since it is
Dynamips, not uBridge, that holds the fds.
Stop is not close: vm stop only halts the emulated router, so the
hypervisor, the TAP fds, the bindings and the per-link bridges all survive
a stop/start untouched (attach skips ports that still hold their TAP NIO).
Port selection follows the adapter registry: ETHERNET_ADAPTERS and
ETHERNET_WICS name the models whose ports carry Ethernet frames (WIC-1ENET
included, at its Dynamips port number); serial, ATM and POS ports never
anchor, and a kernel link there errors with the relay-datapath message
instead of half-wiring. Adapters hot-added to a running router (OIR) get
their anchors at once.
The compute NIO routes accept nio_bridge alongside nio_udp (the same
widening QEMU needed), carry the endpoint's suspend flag on update (it is
the anchor's admin state on a kernel link), skip the hypervisor delete for
a kernel NIO (its TAP NIO was already released by the slot removal), and
the close path leaves NIOBridge instances to _stop_ubridge.
When a hostname validation fails, the error message now includes
the allowed character set to help users provide valid names.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
