I have a question about using the 802.1d driver with a switch. I have a managed switch which connects to the Xscale MAC using a Reverse MII interface. It seems that the 802.1d bridge puts the interface into promiscuous mode and needs multiple ethernet devices to work with. Can it work with a single ethernet device which is connected to a BCM5338 ( broadcomm 8 port switch chip ). I understand that I would have to change the STP configuration component to write to the broadcomm chip. The chip supports direct memory mapped I/O of BPDU's using polled xmite/recieve using a SPI interface. Since I use a soft SPI stack, I cannot go faster than 2MHz. Besides this is a serial interface. Suggestion, comments on both choices are highly appreciated. I am working in a custom enviornment with main objective of detecting loops in a cascade of switches. The physical interconnect of the switches could be linear, tree, star or graph topology. Also, the spanning tree needs to reconverge when switches are connected/disconnected. Since there are no interrupts from the BCM5338, most of the implementation would be based of polling. Maybe, a forwarding delay of 5s should work as this is a LAN environment. -- Atul Linux Engineer
