RFC: ported NetBSD if_bridge
Robert Watson
rwatson at freebsd.org
Sat Apr 17 10:24:01 PDT 2004
On 17 Apr 2004, Lowell Gilbert wrote:
> Julian Elischer <julian at elischer.org> writes:
>
> > On Fri, 16 Apr 2004, Bruce A. Mah wrote:
>
> > > 1. ng_bridge(4) doesn't do spanning tree. Neither does bridge(4).
> >
> > WHICH spanning tree? Spanning tree is a generic term..
> > Are you refering to a particular implimentation of something that uses
> > spanning tree algorythms?
>
> They're referring to IEEE 802.1d. This is an important feature for
> building large bridged networks.
And it's an important part of many ethernet-layer redundancy solutions,
since it allows fail-over when one bridging element or graph edge goes
offline. It's something we really missed in some research work I was
working on to build link layer filters, since it was an easy way to
provide basic fail-over in the presence of ethernet link failures (and
they happen a lot!)
Robert N M Watson FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects
robert at fledge.watson.org Senior Research Scientist, McAfee Research
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