Hi bridge folks,
I'm currently stuck with a simple scenario where enabling bridge multicast snooping causes packetloss for some time:
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(c) <~~~> (A) <---> (B)
(c) is a wifi client, connected to a wifi access point (A). (B) is another AP connected to (A) via ethernet cable. The wifi-ap and ethernet interface are bridged on both (A) and (B).
Now (c) roams from (A) to (B):
(A) <---> (B) <~~~> (c)
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Until the next multicast query is send (up to 125 seconds), (c) will experience multicast packet loss: (B) does not know which multicast traffic (c) wants yet and blocks forwarding multicast traffic to it.
I couldn't find an IETF standard or discussion saying something about how to deal with multicast snooping and roaming yet (I still have the feeling I must have overlooked something as this scenario seems common to me). Does anyone know anything about that or how vendors implement that on their snooping switches?
The behaviour of (c) running a 3.16 kernel is: After setting its wifi interface up, it stays quiet. After getting a link / wifi connects, it sends an IGMP/MLD report first, without waiting for a query. It then sends the IPv6 Neighbor Solicitation messages for Duplicate Address Detection to be able to claim its own IPv6 addresses.
However it does not resend reports / Neighbor Solicitations after the link goes down and up again while the interface itself stays up.
I could think of two ways to solve the issue:
Either let mac80211 (hostapd?) notify the bridge once a new client connects. Then let the bridge send a query to the client immediately and directly.
Or once the bridge adds an fdb entry for a new host, send a query to this host (no matter if it's wireless or not) immediately, directly.
The "directly" could be implemented by setting the ethernet destination to the according unicast MAC instead.
Even though slightly more latency, I'd opt (and would going to provide a patch) for the second case.
What do others think about this?
Cheers, Linus