I am curious though what configuration option prevents this from ending up with software switching The answer is "switchdev": https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/

I am curious though what configuration option prevents this from ending up with software switching The answer is "switchdev": https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/networking/switchdev.html https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/networking/switchdev.... The Linux switchdev driver is the awesome magic that says "make hardware-offloaded switching ASICs look just like software switching". It's beautiful and amazing, as you'd expect from Mellanox.