I haven't been following this closely, so apologies if the point's been made, or if you're talking about unicast addresses here too, but just to be clear: For multicasting, false positives are ok, false negatives are not (non-functional), and if the fixed-size address filter is exceeded, _multicast_promiscuous_ (but not all unicasts, so not promiscuous mode) is the "good" thing to do. So "best effort" still shouldn't lead to an address you previously joined not being passed because a new one is added. Also, if you can't keep all the MAC multicast addresses (ie, the limit is memory and not look-up speed), then getting out of multicast-promiscuous mode correctly isn't easy since you don't know what groups you "forgot". You could rebuild from the protocol memberships, if you know when you've left enough groups to fit, but otherwise the MAC multicast addresses you didn't keep of course won't work if you leave multicast-promiscuous mode and the filter doesn't have them. So, if you're talking about not being able to fit all the address (vs. not wanting to search that many), then I'd suggest either staying in MP mode until ifdown, or making the join a hard failure at the limit in the first place. +-DLS -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe kvm" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html