Re: [mpls-linux-general] mpls labels in ethernet destination address : silly or interesting ?

[James R. L. <jl...@mi...>]

Hello,

In te early days of MPLS there was a suggestion to extend the ethernet header
to do this, but I don't think the idea ever took.

On Wed, Mar 21, 2001 at 03:37:24PM +0100, sk...@en... wrote:
> 
> has anybody thought about embedding MPLS labels in ethernet headers,
> instead of using a shim ? I thought about using last four bytes of
> destination MAC address to carry MPLS labels. it would require
> the receiver to work in promiscuous mode, or to set the multi/broad
> cast bit of the destination MAC address, or to find some hack in
> the NIC driver code to allow some kind of filtering.

You can't really just grab the last 4 octects because the resulting
MAC (after overwritting wit the label) might be a valid MAC used by a machine
on the network.

Jim

> 
> would there be some interest in doing that way, or is there
> some major pitfall I did not think of ?
> 
> 
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-- 
James R. Leu