[Ns-bugs] [Bug 274] point to point device cannot ignore from and to addresses

[bugzilla-daemon@nsnam-www.ece.gatech.edu]

http://www.nsnam.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=274





------- Comment #5 from mathieu.lacage at sophia.inria.fr  2008-08-25 18:32 -------
(In reply to comment #4)
> (In reply to comment #3)
> > tom and I discussed this so, here is a summary:
> > 
> > 1) There are certain kinds of devices which will be incompatible with others
> > when put under the same bridge. For example, devices which use incompatible
> > address types won't be able to be bridged together.
> 
> At the moment the bridging code attempts to convert addresses to Mac48Address. 
> Any netdevice that doesn't use Mac48Address will trigger assertion errors in
> runtime.

ok.

> The bridging code is mean to work only on 802 netdevices.  In real world I am
> not aware of bridging using other kinds of addresses, so in my opinion this
> isn't a real problem.

I think that Mac64 addresses are valid 802 devices.

> 
> > 
> > 2) the _model_ of the p2p device is incompatible with bridging (it is not the
> > implementation which is at fault). This means that bridging somewhat needs to
> > be optional at least in this case.
> 
> Indeed, this seems rather obvious to me.  The only way for p2p to be usable for
> bridging would be via Ethernet encapsulation (add EthernetHeader before
> transmitting, remove it when receiving).

yes.

> 
> > 
> > 3) we need to figure out how we can detect bridging incompatibilities.
> 
> This is just about detecting a user program error.  I would say this "would be
> nice", but not something we _have_ to do IMHO.

It is important because otherwise, users won't be able to figure out what will
go wrong.

Another important item which occured to me while working on that for wifi is
that we probably also need:

class NetDevice {
  virtual bool SupportsBridging (void) const = 0;
};


i.e., adhoc and STA wifi devices cannot support bridging while AP wifi devices
can support it.


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