[OpenWrt-Devel] General questions about the direction of switch drivers

[Michael Richardson]

First, there are a lot of discussions and papers at netdev01.org about the
various hardware switch management systems.  I point specifically to a talk
this morning:
     https://www.netdev01.org/sessions/19

I have stumbed my toe on 3800 with trying to build tagged switch ports where
I have a few ports with explicit VLAN tagging, joined together in the switch,
and also exposed to the host.  I think it should work, but I mostly just wound
up screwing up my CPU port.  I have some 3800 with serial consoles now so I
should try this out.

What would be ideal, and my impression is that this is where the industry
wants to go, is that one would use brctl and vconfig to build the switch
configuration that you want, and the drivers below would realize that the
switch can do that work, and would program things correctly.

openvswitch is about creating a virtual switch fabric in the CPU, which can
spread elsewhere --- the trend is though, that this too would be subject to
hardware offload.

--
]               Never tell me the odds!                 | ipv6 mesh networks [
]   Michael Richardson, Sandelman Software Works        | network architect  [
]     mcr at sandelman.ca  http://www.sandelman.ca/        |   ruby on rails    [
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