Hi,
This patchset adds two improvements for the broadcast flooding algorithm:
The first patch refactors/reorders the broadcast packet queueing. Before a broadcast packet was always queued. Now the queueing decision is performed on a per interface basis. Also the first broadcast is always transmitted immediately, without queueing now to increase performance.
Furthermore this restructuring prepares for the next two patches:
Patches 2 and 3 introduce a broadcast-packet-to-unicast mechanism. Similar to the multicast-to-unicast feature of the multicast back-end a broadcast packet is split into multiple unicast transmissions. The major difference here, for the broadcast flooding, is that it is performed on a per-hop instead of the initial originator node basis.
This should improve throughput and reliability in densely populated receiver scenarios, where the multicast back-end is not able to operate (the multicast back-end is more targeted at sparsely populated receiver scenarios so far).
Regards, Linus