Hi, I'm interested in running IPv6 only ethernet interfaces. I've also been digging around the tech spec sheets for a few of the network cards I own, mostly to get a bit more of an idea how they work. One thing I've come across is that reception of ethernet broadcast frames seems to be a capability that can be switched on or off. This seems to be the case for my old 8390 based NE2Ks, my SMC Epic100 and my Netgear FA312 cards. As IPv6 only uses unicast and multicast addresses, I think it would be a useful to be able to disable broadcast reception on IPv6 only interfaces. From memory, Appletalk works the same way, so there also could be value in disabling ethernet broadcast reception on Appletalk only interfaces. Is there any way to easily do this ? Thinking about this reminded me a bit about layer 3 protocols were configured on Novell Netware servers. At various stages I've worked with Novell Netware servers that supported IP, IPX and Appletalk. To enable a particular layer 3 protocol, you "bound" it to a specific network card, while also assigning it the appropriate layer 3 protocol address. I'm not sure if it did, however I'm wondering if somehow the binding process also indicated to the ethernet card driver what capabilities, specifically things such as receiving broadcasts or multicasts, were required to be enabled. Would there be value in Linux being evolved to a similar model ? Alternatively, maybe layer 2 flags, eg., whether or not to receive broadcasts, could be passed to the device driver when a particular type of layer 3 address is assigned to the interface. If a layer-2-broadcast based protocol wasn't configured on the ethernet interface, the interface would ignore layer 2 broadcasts. Any thoughts or suggestions ? Please CC me as I'm not subscribed to the list. Thanks, Mark. - : send the line "unsubscribe linux-net" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
