On 02/10/2012 05:54 AM, Bob Hoffman wrote:
Yea, I gave up on bonding, ended up just using eth1. But every tutorial I found had added eth0 and eth1 as interfaces to br0, thus sharing the bridge so to speak.
Those tutorials were documenting the manner in which you can set up a transparent Linux firewall. That's not what you want to do with a KVM server.
Creating an Ethernet bridge and adding two interfaces to it effectively makes a Linux host into a two-port switch with firewalling.
If you connect multiple ports from one switch to ports on a second switch (two bridged Linux Ethernet ports to a switch) you create a switch loop. Switch loops will endlessly replay broadcast traffic (such as ARP), creating a broadcast storm.
Yes, that can consume all of a router's CPU cycles quite easily. That is why data centers should always run spanning tree on their switches. STP will shut off ports that get looped.