On Wed, May 11, 2011 at 09:45:34AM -0700, Matt Thomas wrote: > > On May 10, 2011, at 7:36 PM, Daniel Carosone wrote: > > > Please look at solaris' dladm infrastructure. > > While interesting, it doesn't seem to address the issue. It seems > to manage the vlan and agr functionality but not bridging. There's an equivalent of our bridge(4) as well as a TRILL-capable mode for it in there. While it's true that this currently is a software bridge between normal nics, the way the stack is arranged there's no reason why some other device couldn't provide several of the functions in hardware - much as the stack allows different hardware capabilities WRT vlan tagging. > A system i have has a gige interface connecting to a VSC7385 5 port > switch thus providing 4 external ports. Each of these ports has its > own link media attributes and vlan settings and the switch itself > can provide multiple bridging domains. That's a pretty common arrangement for commodity routery-type boxes, among others. There are also PCI cards that have a similar arrangement. > For now, I'm completely ignoring that the switch exists and things > just work for a simple LAN. But if I want VLAN tagging, bridging, > or aggregation the switch needs to get involved. In such a framework, a driver or config parser could arrange for the various components (ports and a bridge and maybe an aggr) to be automatically constructed in the right topology. Depending on the flexibility of the switch, admin commands to adjust this (such as creating a second bridging domain) will get mapped to switch config calls rather than changing the config of the soft switch. Each function would be provided by a device-specific driver that operates the same as the software one in the same framework. -- Dan.
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