DSA Mini-tutorial still marked as Work In Progress

David Lang david at lang.hm
Fri Sep 9 05:21:26 PDT 2022


On Fri, 9 Sep 2022, Michael Richardson wrote:

> Jo-Philipp Wich <jo at mein.io> wrote:
>    > Bluntly speaking, DSA is the thing that gives you one Linux network
>    > device per switch port and bridge VLAN filtering is the stuff that
>    > allows you declaring swconfig-esque VLAN port groups on top of an
>    > arbitrary bridge interface.
>
> ..
>
>    > Another conceptual issue I see is that people came to expect a
>    > dedicated "switch" configuration ui which is something that does not
>    > really work with DSA devices anymore since there is no dedicated switch
>    > hardware entity to interact with anymore (DSA takes care of completely
>    > abstracting this away from the user point of view) and that
>    > bridge-vlans just happen to be a configuration detail of a bridge, and
>    > that there happens to be a bridge "br-lan" by default, but a system
>    > could have multiple bridges, or none at all.
>
>    > So we should also explain why there is no central "switch
>    > configuration" anymore and that this does not translate into a loss of
>    > functionality, but that the former semi opague swconfig switch
>    > configuration entity was dissolved into a bunch of ethernet devices
>    > inside a bridge...
>
> +1

One thing that we do need to show is what ethernet devices are on the switch, 
there is a considerable CPU load to routing traffic through the processor vs 
through the switch, so when people are deciding what ports to use for different 
purposes, they need to easily be able to see this info.

David Lang



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