[Etherboot-developers] Re: multicast

[Eric W B. <ebi...@ln...>]

Ronald G Minnich <rmi...@la...> writes:

> Eric one thing to keep in mind: when we were still doing multicast with
> our stuff we found that our Black Diamond switch had much higher loss
> rates with multicast than with just sending broadcast. So we turned off
> the fancy multicast and just used broadcast packets.

Good point.  Most of the code should actually accomodate a broadcast
ip address.  Though I haven't tested that case.

What we found here was that when we went to half duplex communication
our switch drop rates for multicast packects appear to have gone down.
At the very least I have not observed a significant drop rate for
multicast packets so I will cross that bridge when I come to it.

Ron have you been able to reproduce the smart core problem with the
current etherboot-5.1 cvs tree?

Eric