From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Jeff Garzik Subject: Re: [NET 00/02]: MACVLAN driver Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2007 02:34:39 -0400 Message-ID: <4678CA7F.8070002@garzik.org> References: <20070619130825.26769.23059.sendpatchset@localhost.localdomain> <20070619090027.3312f2cf@localhost.localdomain> <4678472D.5050907@trash.net> <20070619.154840.55744015.davem@davemloft.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: shemminger@linux-foundation.org, netdev@vger.kernel.org To: David Miller , kaber@trash.net Return-path: Received: from srv5.dvmed.net ([207.36.208.214]:38733 "EHLO mail.dvmed.net" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1758028AbXFTGep (ORCPT ); Wed, 20 Jun 2007 02:34:45 -0400 In-Reply-To: <20070619.154840.55744015.davem@davemloft.net> Sender: netdev-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: netdev.vger.kernel.org David Miller wrote: > This is actually a real issue for virtualization, and many > if not all current generation ethernet chips support > programming several unicast ethernet addresses in the MAC. > > Networking switches in domain0 on virtualization hosts use > this feature to support seperate MACs per guest node, > and if the chip doesn't support this the chip is put into > promiscuous mode. > > We don't have any clean interfaces by which to do this MAC > programming, and we do need something for it soon. Yep, that's been on my long term wish list for a while, as well. Overall I would like to see a more flexible way of allowing the net stack to learn each NIC's RX filter capabilities, and exploiting them. Plenty of NICs, even 100Mbps ones, support RX filter management that allows scanning for $hw_limit unicast addresses, before having to put the hardware into promisc mode. Jeff