[Tipc-discussion] 64-bit processor node id

[Kevin K. He <he...@ya...>]

Currently I see the driver.c uses a "int node" to store
the process node id.  So it will be 32-bit node id on
32-bit processors.

I am thinking that whether we can make it 64-bit. The reason is 
that 64-bit integer is enough to store ethernet MAC address. 
So in order to generate a cluster-wide unique node id the
managment planes on different nodes don't need exchange any 
network packets because they can simply use MAC addresses 
as their node ids.

One motivation of using TIPC in our project is that we can
avoid the complexity of IP address managment in a stack of
L2 switches. With 64-bit node id, I guess every node in our
stack can start tipc totally independent from others.

Will there be negative impact of 64-bit node id on the tipc ?

Thank you!

Kevin