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The point about number of MAC filters is fairly moot as when you do bridging in hardware you are not going to utilize any kind of hardware MAC filtering capabil
by dfox 5y ago
The point about number of MAC filters is fairly moot as when you do bridging in hardware you are not going to utilize any kind of hardware MAC filtering capability anyway. Also the issue of flooding tends to be solved by the physical switches in the network.
- yokaze 5y agoSo, we are in agreement in that point: if you are going that way, you are relying on the physical switches. I'm not sure about the problem being solved, depending on the scale. If you are with your use-case (number of rules, macs, five-tuples, ...) outside the capabilities of the hardware, then, in my experience, it breaks down quickly. (I.e. flooding, or becoming unresponsive to configuration commands and needed to be _power cycled_, ...). And those are switches costing easily five figures, and from two different well known vendors. If you have practical experience with a setup, which scales more gracefully, please share. But I'm sceptical that it exists, considering Google, Facebook, AWS all went with custom hardware. I'm wondering, if at a certain scale of virtual NICs/flows per port, you are not better off with a hybrid approach, where software is part of a decision hierarchy. E.g Openflow. No practical experience though.