On Thu, 2012-06-07 at 21:07 +0000, Dave Hart wrote:
Bzzt. With ARP, every IPv4 node on the link indicates each ARP packet to the OS. With ND, only those nodes sharing the same last 24 bits of the IPv6 address indicate the packet up the stack. The rest of the IPv6 nodes filter the multicast in the NIC.
Still not quite correct :-) The "filtering" is done by a MLD-aware switch, which will send multicast packets only to nodes that are listening to the appropriate multicast group. The filtering you describe is pretty much what ARP does - ALL nodes receive the packet, all but one ignore it. It depends on the platform whether the CPU that does the ignoring is just in the NIC or is in the node itself. Regards, K. -- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Karl Auer (kauer@biplane.com.au) http://www.biplane.com.au/kauer GPG fingerprint: AE1D 4868 6420 AD9A A698 5251 1699 7B78 4EEE 6017 Old fingerprint: DA41 51B1 1481 16E1 F7E2 B2E9 3007 14ED 5736 F687