We're halfway there (OK, a bit less, they've messed up OSPF) with the unnumbered VLAN interfaces.
http://wiki.nil.com/Unnumbered_Ethernet_VLAN_interfaces What's missing is the removal of MAC layer header, but that would require modifications to the NIC chipsets (= expensive). Ivan http://www.ioshints.info/about http://blog.ioshints.info/ > -----Original Message----- > From: Andre Oppermann [mailto:nanog-l...@nrg4u.com] > Sent: Wednesday, July 08, 2009 12:01 PM > To: nanog@nanog.org > Subject: Point to Point Ethernet > > A few time already I've wished for a fully standardized and > vendor interoperable way of doing a true point to point ethernet link. > > It would work just like an old leased line or synchronous > serial interface and completely do away with ARP, MAC > addresses and all that stuff. Obviously no switches in > between would be allowed. > Each side would run in "promiscuous mode" where every > ethernet frame is received and passed up to the network stack > (just like on a serial link). Since MAC addresses are > useless they can be scrapped and only the ethertype field > remains. This increases the effective MTU by 12 bytes. > > The framing overhead goes away and the packet can directly be > directly placed on the wire without taking a detour through > L3->L2 lookup and encapsulation step. > > More importantly one can specify the just the outgoing > interface again instead of the next hop: > > ip route 10.0.0.0 255.0.0.0 g0/1 > > Do you think this is useful? Maybe vendors will hear me/us. > > -- > Andre > > >
