I have a question about using the 802.1d driver with a switch. I have a
managed switch
which connects to the Xscale MAC using a Reverse MII interface.
It seems that the 802.1d bridge puts the interface into promiscuous mode and
needs multiple
ethernet devices to work with. Can it work with a single ethernet device
which is connected
to a BCM5338 ( broadcomm 8 port switch chip ).
I understand that I would have to change the STP configuration component to
write to the
broadcomm chip.
The chip supports direct memory mapped I/O of BPDU's using polled
xmite/recieve using
a SPI interface. Since I use a soft SPI stack, I cannot go faster than
2MHz. Besides this
is a serial interface.
Suggestion, comments on both choices are highly appreciated. I am working
in a custom
enviornment with main objective of detecting loops in a cascade of switches.
The physical
interconnect of the switches could be linear, tree, star or graph topology.
Also, the spanning tree needs to reconverge when switches are
connected/disconnected.
Since there are no interrupts from the BCM5338, most of the implementation
would be
based of polling. Maybe, a forwarding delay of 5s should work as this is a
LAN environment.
--
Atul
Linux Engineer
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