[rbridge] Consensus Check: Point to Point links

[Radia Perlman]

Personally, I need a reminder of what we are trying to accomplish with 
this before I can have
any opinion.

a) Is omitting the outer VLAN tag to save space?
b) Why put in anything for destination address other than the MAC 
address of the next hop
RBridge, or put in anything into the source address other than your own 
MAC address?
It won't save space. So what does it gain?
c) Is there any danger if an RBridge is confused about whether this is a 
pt-to-pt link or not?

I can see the advantage of omitting the entire outer header if it is 
somehow absolutely
known this is a pt-to-pt link, and both ends of the link understand 
this. But that isn't what's
being proposed here. It seems to be only omitting the VLAN tag, and 
allowing insertion of
random addresses into the source and destination fields in the outer 
header, if I'm reading
it correctly.

So anyway, clarification at this point would certainly help me.


Eastlake III Donald-LDE008 wrote:
> This is a check via the mailing list to confirm or refute an apparent
> consensus from the minutes of the Chicago meeting for a change from
> protocol draft -05:
>
>    If it is known that a link is a point to point link between two
>    RBridges, then the outer header, if it is an Ethernet header, can
>    have any source and/or destination addresses, those addresses will
>    be ignored on receipt, and the outer VLAN tag can be omitted.
>
> If no particular controversy arises over this in the next two weeks, we
> will declare it to be the working group consensus.
>
> Thanks,
> Donald & Erik
>
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