Re: [PATCH net-next v4 3/3] net: dsa: enable flooding for bridge ports

[Vivien Didelot <vivien.didelot@gmail.com>]

On Wed, 20 Feb 2019 20:56:04 +0000, Russell King <rmk+kernel@armlinux.org.uk> wrote:
> Switches work by learning the MAC address for each attached station by
> monitoring traffic from each station.  When a station sends a packet,
> the switch records which port the MAC address is connected to.
> 
> With IPv4 networking, before communication commences with a neighbour,
> an ARP packet is broadcasted to all stations asking for the MAC address
> corresponding with the IPv4.  The desired station responds with an ARP
> reply, and the ARP reply causes the switch to learn which port the
> station is connected to.
> 
> With IPv6 networking, the situation is rather different.  Rather than
> broadcasting ARP packets, a "neighbour solicitation" is multicasted
> rather than broadcasted.  This multicast needs to reach the intended
> station in order for the neighbour to be discovered.
> 
> Once a neighbour has been discovered, and entered into the sending
> stations neighbour cache, communication can restart at a point later
> without sending a new neighbour solicitation, even if the entry in
> the neighbour cache is marked as stale.  This can be after the MAC
> address has expired from the forwarding cache of the DSA switch -
> when that occurs, there is a long pause in communication.
> 
> Our DSA implementation for mv88e6xxx switches disables flooding of
> multicast and unicast frames for bridged ports.  As per the above
> description, this is fine for IPv4 networking, since the broadcasted
> ARP queries will be sent to and received by all stations on the same
> network.  However, this breaks IPv6 very badly - blocking neighbour
> solicitations and later causing connections to stall.
> 
> The defaults that the Linux bridge code expect from bridges are for
> unknown unicast and unknown multicast frames to be flooded to all ports
> on the bridge, which is at odds to the defaults adopted by our DSA
> implementation for mv88e6xxx switches.
> 
> This commit enables by default flooding of both unknown unicast and
> unknown multicast frames whenever a port is added to a bridge, and
> disables the flooding when a port leaves the bridge.  This means that
> mv88e6xxx DSA switches now behave as per the bridge(8) man page, and
> IPv6 works flawlessly through such a switch.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Russell King <rmk+kernel@armlinux.org.uk>

Reviewed-by: Vivien Didelot <vivien.didelot@gmail.com>