Messages in this thread | | | From | Gleb Natapov <> | Date | Wed, 20 Jun 2001 12:32:33 +0300 | Subject | Re: Should VLANs be devices or something else? |
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On Tue, Jun 19, 2001 at 03:49:13PM -0700, David S. Miller wrote: > > Dax Kelson writes: > > On Tue, 19 Jun 2001, Ben Greear wrote: > > > Should VLANs be devices or some other thing? > > > > I would vote that VLANs be devices. > > > > Conceptually, VLANs as network devices is a no brainer. > > Conceptually, svr4 streams are a beautiful and elegant > mechanism. :-) > > Technical implementation level concerns need to be considered > as well as "does it look nice".
How can I implement intermediate layer between L3 and L2 in the current kernel? This is what VLAN is all about. The only way to do it today is to pretend to be a network device for L3, do your job (adding VLAN header) and the job of L2 (build ethernet header) and queue packet to master device for transition. This is what ipip module does, this is what bonding module does and many others. And this is because L1 and L2 coupled too tightly together in the kernel now. In fact it is almost impossible to implement new L2 protocol without changing net_device structure. Something should be done about L1+L2 design till then pretend to be the net_device is the only solution if you want VLAN to be transparent for L3 protocols. If you want to implement VLANs only for IP layer this can be done differently of course.
P.S: This topic was already discussed on netdev list before (and not once I think :)).
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