Hello Linus, thank you very much for the patch proposal.
> Hi there, > > Here's a little, rough patch to illustrate the idea we discussed a little > at the last Wireless Battle Mesh, that is forwarding the noisy IPv6 > Unsolicited Neighbor Advertisements and gratuitous ARP Replies via unicast. > > Currently these ugly unsol. NAs cause about 40% of ICMPv6 multicast > overhead in our networks here. I think it's quite a good idea - to motivate your proposal, I'd suggest to add some information on how many broadcasts you think you can save in your networks - 40% of ICMPv6 traffic is a little vague, since we don't know how much of your traffic is ICMPv6 and what you have already blocked. > > A little more detailed explanation with some pictures can be found here: > > https://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki/Unicasting-unsolicited-n > eighbor-advertisements Nice page. :) > > In the few, simple scenarios with bridged-in hosts in VMs, the patch > seemed to do what it was supposed to do uppon roaming. Unsol. NAs did only > appear on the node the host roamed away from. > > If I remember correctly, there were also some worries about how this > might work together with BLA-II. I gave it a little more thought and > had a look at the BLA-II source code, but couldn't find any issues. I don't see any issues either - as you've implemented, it should be similarly working as the DHCP requests from client. > > The only BLA-II related non-ideal thing I could think of so far is > noted in the code of this patch at the according place (but I think > that might not matter much in practice). You describe that this feature could be used for hot-swapping, and as far as I understand, turning on that feature could break IPv6 hotswapping? I don't know how much this is actually used and its probably not the most common thing for our networks (and isn't reliable anyway), but you should make you feature optional with a sysfs option or similar. Then users or firmware engineers can turn that feature on as required, just as BLA and others. Thanks, Simon
