[rbridge] STP and ISIS

[Tom Sanders]

Hi,

Going through draft-perlman-rbridge-03.txt raised a doubt in my mind.
Please let me know if my understanding of the matter is indeed
correct:

As per the draft, spanning tree algos concentrate a lot of traffic on
certain links as it marks some ports as blocked and only the ones that
are in the forwarding state can pass traffic. But as per my limited
knowledge, wouldnt STP mark only the redundant links as blocked? If we
dont mark them as blocked, then wouldnt that result in transient
loops, etc.

Then the draft says that there are other issues as well because of
which the group has decided to use a link state routing protocol; more
specifically ISIS because of the advantages it offers against OSPF
(TLV encoded, runs over L2, etc).

So, is the proposal to totally do away with STP et. al and run only
ISIS instead? The spanning tree is then computed with the topology
information provided by ISIS. Is this correct?

If this is so, then we will once again mark some ports as blocked,
etc. How different is this from calculating the spanning tree via the
STP protocol?

Thanks
-- 
Toms.