fcoemon - Man Page

fcoemon [-f|--foreground] [-l|--legacy] [-d|--debug] [-s|--syslog]

fcoemon -h|--help

fcoemon -v|--version

The fcoemon daemon is the core component of the Open-FCoE management service.

The primary function of fcoemon is to control FCoE instances. fcoemon will create, destroy, reset, enable and disable FCoE instances based on system configuration, administrative commands, and runtime events.

On startup, fcoemon will create FCoE instances defined by the configuration files (see Files section below). Since FCoE typically relies on the Data Center Bridging (DCB) capabilities of an Ethernet interface, fcoemon establishes a connection with the LLDP daemon lldpad to query the status of the DCB features on relevant Ethernet interfaces and receive DCB configuration change events.

During runtime, fcoemon will monitor network and lldpad events for the relevant Ethernet interfaces and perform appropriate actions (create, destroy, enable, disable) on the FCoE instances. fcoemon also provides a client interface via which the fcoeadm utility is able to issue commands.

Installation of the fcoe-utils package will set up an fcoe service which will control the execution of the fcoemon daemon.

-f,  --foreground

Run fcoemon in the foreground.

-d,  --debug

Enable debugging messages.

-l,  --legacy

Force fcoemon to use the legacy /sys/module/libfcoe/parameters/ interface. The default is to use the newer /sys/bus/fcoe/ interfaces if they are available.

-s,  --syslog

Use syslogd for logging. The default behavior is to log to stdout and stderr.

-h,  --help

Show help message with basic usage instructions

-v,  --version

Show the version of the fcoemon command.

DCB

Data Center Bridging A set of Ethernet enhancement standards developed by the IEEE 802.1 Working Group.

 

See http://www.ieee802.org/1/pages/dcbridges.html for more information.

DCBX

DCB Capabilities Exchange Protocol, implemented by the DCB module of lldpad. DCBX exchanges DCB capabilities and configuration with a link partner as a series of values transferred using the Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP).

PFC

Priority-based Flow Control, a DCB feature.

App:FCoE

The FCoE instance of application specific parameters in DCBX.

fcoemon uses two information sources for determining when to create an FCoE instance: the state of the network interface, which may be a VLAN interface, and, if required for the FCoE instance, the state of the DCB configuration on the physical Ethernet interface.

First of all, the network interface must be "up" for the FCoE instance to be created. Secondly, if the FCoE configuration indicates that DCB is required, then the following criteria must be satisfied before the FCoE interface is created:

• DCB is enabled on the Ethernet interface.
• The PFC DCB feature is enabled and operational.
• The App:FCoE DCB feature is enabled and operational.
• The priority indicated by the App:FCoE feature is also enabled for PFC.

Once the FCoE instance is created by fcoemon, it will only be destroyed under the following conditions:

• The driver for the Ethernet interface is unloaded.
• A user administratively destroys the FCoE instance using fcoeadm.
• The fcoemon daemon is terminated.

If DCB is required for the FCoE instance, and the DCB settings change after the interface is created, the following criteria are used to disable the FCoE instance:

• DCB is disabled on the Ethernet interface.
• The App:FCoE DCB feature is not enabled.
• The App:FCoE and PFC features are operational AND the priority indicated by App:FCoE is not enabled for PFC.

Otherwise, the FCoE instance will always remain enabled.

Once the fcoe-utils and lldpad packages have been installed and the corresponding services are running, there are a few simple configuration steps required to get an FCoE instance up and running. The following assumes that DCB will be required for the interface.

• Ensure that the configuration on the peer device (e.g. FCoE capable switch) has the necessary configurations (VLANs, DCB, DCBX).
• Configure any needed VLAN interfaces on the local system.
• Create and configure /etc/fcoe/cfg-<ifname> files for the network interfaces over which FCoE instances need to be created. See the Files sections for details. Note that ifname may be for a VLAN interface.
• Restart the fcoe service (i.e. fcoemon).

• The default DCB configuration of an Ethernet interface managed by lldpad requires the following configuration using dcbtool.

  dcbtool sc ethX dcb on          <-- enable DCB on the interface
  dcbtool sc ethX app:fcoe e:1    <-- enable App:FCoE on the interface

These steps only need to be done one time. Note that if other DCB configuration changes have been made with dcbtool, then additional changes may need to be made in order to satisfy the DCB criteria for creating an FCoE instance. Consult dcbtool for details.

Once these configuration steps have been performed, use fcoeadm to query the status of the FCoE instances.

If a new VLAN device is created (see the description of the AUTO_VLAN setting above), it will have the name dev.vlan-fcoe; where dev is the name of the Ethernet parent device and vlan is the discovered VLAN ID number.

fcoeadm(8) lldpad(8) lldptool(8) dcbtool(8)

fcoemon is part of the fcoe-utils package, maintained through the Open-FCoE project. Resources for both developers and users can be found at the Open-FCoE website http://open-fcoe.org/

fcoeadm(8), fcoemon_selinux(8), fipvlan(8).