vlans and cloning

[Andrew Thompson]

On Tue, Jul 11, 2006 at 11:51:49PM +0100, Robert Watson wrote:
> On Tue, 11 Jul 2006, Brooks Davis wrote:
> 
> >>>Unless cause ifconfig to autoload all if_ modules when cloning fails, 
> >>>it's impossiable to support this without having if_vlan loaded.  That 
> >>>said the current plan it to eliminate if_vlan and integrate vlan support 
> >>>directly into if_ethersubr.c to allow use to correctly handle the 
> >>>default vlan case among otherthings.
> >>
> >>Is anyone working on this? The bridge code needs access to the vlan tag 
> >>to properly hash the address as each vlan is a seperate broadcast domain, 
> >>this would be much easier with vlan merged to if_ethersubr.c.
> >
> >I think it ended up with Robert's name on it at the last devsummit, but 
> >he's got a lot of higher priority stuff on his plate.  It doesn't look 
> >like this change would be all that much work.  The one thing that might be 
> >worth investigating is seeing if there's a sane way to make vlan tag 
> >parsing part of ether_input, but keep if_vlan.c around as a module for 
> >actual support of trunks so we get most of the architectural benefits of 
> >correctly treating vlan tags as part of the spec, but let embedded users 
> >who don't need trunks avoid the overhead.
> 
> Yes -- the specific proposal I have made is that we combine if_vlan.c into 
> if_ethersubr.c, as well as LLC encapsulation decapsulation.  Vlans and LLC 
> bits are all considered standard ethernet features today, and integrating 
> the basic support (regardless of virtual interfaces) into if_ethersubr.c 
> makes sense.  It would also make the book keeping and event handling go a 
> bit more naturally, I think.  I've not had a chance to prototype this to 
> explore what the above words actually mean, so I think some experimental 
> prototyping is called for.  It's on my todo list but something I'm likely 
> not to get to for a few months, so if someone else wants to look into this, 
> I think that would be great.

This is something I can start working on, all keep the interested
parties informed.

Andrew