This series adds functionality to the bridge device to enable operations without setting all ports to promiscuous mode. The basic concept is this. The bridge keeps track of the ports that support learning and flooding packets to unknown destinations. We call these ports auto-discovery ports since they automatically discover who is behind them through learning and flooding. If flooding and learning are disabled via flags, then the port requires static configuration to tell it which mac addresses are behind it. This is accomplished through adding of fdbs. These fdbs should be static as dynamic fdbs can expire and systems will become unreachable due to lack of flooding. If the user marks all ports as needing static configuration then we can safely make them non-promiscuous since we will know all the information about them. If the user leaves only 1 port as automatic, then we can mark that port as not-promiscuous as well. One could think of this a edge relay similar to what's support by embedded switches in SRIOV devices. Since we have all the information about the other ports, we can just program the mac addresses into the single automatic port to receive all necessary traffic. More information about this is patch 6. In other cases, we keep all ports promiscuous as before. There are some other cases when promiscuous mode has to be turned back on. One is when the bridge itself if placed in promiscuous mode (user sets promisc flag). The other is if vlan filtering is turned off. Since this is the default configuration, the default bridge operation is not changed. Changes since rfc v2: - Better description of in the commit logs - Leave port in promiscuous mode if IFF_UNICAST_FLT is disabled on the device. - Fix issue with flag masking - Rework patch ordering a bit. Changes since rfc v1: - Removed private list. We now traverse the fdb hashtable itself to write necessary addresses to the ports (Stephen's concern) - Add learning flag to the mask for flags that decides if the port is 'auto' or not (suggest by MST and Jamal). - Simplified tracking of such ports at the cost of a loop over all ports (suggested by MST) I've played with quite a large number of ports and the current approach seems to work fairly well. Thanks -vlad Vlad Yasevich (8): bridge: Turn flag change macro into a function. bridge: Keep track of ports capable of automatic discovery. bridge: Add functionality to sync static fdb entries to hw bridge: Introduce BR_PROISC flag bridge: Add addresses from static fdbs to non-promisc ports bridge: Automatically manage port promiscuous mode. bridge: Correctly manage promiscuity when user requested it. bridge: Automatically manage promisc mode when vlan filtering is on. net/bridge/br_device.c | 7 +++ net/bridge/br_fdb.c | 132 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++--- net/bridge/br_if.c | 126 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-- net/bridge/br_netlink.c | 3 ++ net/bridge/br_private.h | 20 +++++++ net/bridge/br_sysfs_if.c | 31 +++++++---- net/bridge/br_vlan.c | 1 + 7 files changed, 300 insertions(+), 20 deletions(-) -- 1.9.0