On Fri, Mar 09, 2012 at 01:04:55PM +0100, Gabriel Kerneis wrote:
On Fri, Mar 09, 2012 at 07:26:54PM +0800, Marek Lindner wrote:
The concept of a primary interface goes back into the early days of batman and primarily is an optimization to reduce overhead. At some point we realized that it is not necessary to flood the mesh with OGMs from each and every interface we have. Nearby nodes might want to know about all interfaces to select the best one. Nodes that are far away don't care which interface is connected to what other interface. They only care about a route to their destination. This concept is briefly explained here[1] (section 2.1.6 and 2.1.7).
Thanks for the pointer.
Does that mean that it is impossible to announce a route on some interfaces only? It looks like a rather arbitrary limitation.
OGMs are broadcasted over all the interfaces (there may be some neighs reachable only by one interface) and you can't force an OGM to be broadcasted only over one of them. I hope I correctly got your question.
In case I misunderstood and it is actually possible, I fail to see ĥow the alternating algorithm takes this into account: it seems to assume that a node will accept to route any packet on any interface. Did I miss something?
Packets are alternatively routed on all the "possible" interfaces (a neighbor could be connected only to a subset of them) until the metric on that interface is acceptable. I hope I correctly got your question again.
Cheers,