Re: Exact meaning of "nativeMode" attribute in vlan tags

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On 02/22/2015 01:31 PM, Laine Stump wrote:
You'd think that I would know this, since I'm the person who reviewed
jrobson's patch adding support for the nativeMode attribute to the vlan
tag element. But you'd be wrong. Here is what the config looks like:


     <vlan trunk='yes'>
       <tag id='42' nativeMode='untagged'/>
       <tag id='47'/>
     </vlan>

I understand that trunk='yes' means that packets with any of the tags
listed in a <tag> subelement can be sent out this port (and the tag will
*not* be removed), and likewise packets arriving into the bridge from
the port are allowed to have any of the listed tags (and, again, no tag
will be removed). But what exactly do nativeMode='untagged' and
nativeMode='tagged' mean?

As I understand it, (nativeMode='untagged'|nativeMode='tagged') means
that packets (arriving from|sent to) the port (without a tag/with that
tag) will be (tagged|untagged). Can someone who fully understands this
please select A or B for each of the 4 parenthesized items (in as many
permutations as make sense).

I guess that in one of the modes, untagged packets going in one
direction or the other will be tagged, and vice versa, I just don't know
which direction does which, and for which mode, and don't want to guess.

(I'm asking this because I want to implement identical functionality for
standard Linux host bridges - I want to make sure there are no surprises
for people switching between OVS and Linux host bridge implementations).

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Laine,

You are on the right path for figuring this out. I'm coming from a more traditional hardware networking viewpoint with vast experience in Cisco and HP switching products. In that arena, the "Native" vlan is the vlan of the trunk itself. For example, lets say you have a trunk carrying vlans 20-26, with a native vlan of 15. This native vlan only comes into play when that vlan interface on the switch itself has an IP address. Consider it the infrastructure management vlan - you really don't want it on vlan 1 (which is the default, and all trunks are have a native vlan of 1) for security purposes, so you create a management vlan and assign the vlan interface on all of your switches with an IP address from that range. When the trunks are built, the native vlan carries the untagged packets for the management network, while the tagged vlans are trunked through.

In this specific scenario, and to answer your questions as asked, nativeMode='untagged' means that packets traveling to and from that port on that specific vlan ID will be untagged. nativeMode='tagged' means that packets in the native vlan will be tagged when sent or received on that port.

I hope this helps, I can try to reword it if I made it even more confusing.

-Dan

--
Dan Mossor
Systems Engineer at Large
Fedora KDE WG | Fedora QA Team | Fedora Server SIG
Fedora Infrastructure Apprentice
FAS: dmossor IRC: danofsatx
San Antonio, Texas, USA

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