Hardware bridging for Distributed Switch Architecture (DSA)

Hi,

I'm interested in working on hardware bridging support for the
Distributed Switch Architecture (DSA).

I have a few questions about this patch [1] :

"(While the patch in itself works, the implementation is ugly, and I
don't see it being merged upstream in this form any time soon"

Why this? What needs to be done to clean it up, and have it in shape?

"While conceptually I think this is the way this should work (i.e. no
workflow changes for the system administrator) "

I have worked a bit on this subject too and concluded to the same idea.

" the code shouldn't be hooking directly into the bridge code at all.
Ideally, it should just be using a netlink interface providing this info:
- bridge port group creation/destruction
- adding/removing an interface to/from a bridge port group
- changing the STP state of an interface in a bridge port group"

Doesn't brctl already uses netlink to configure the bridge? Could you expand
a bit more on this?

I like this approach of automatically hardware-bridge ports if possible when
adding them to a bridge. Do you mean putting a specific API in netlink
for doing
the hardware bridging stuff ?

Regards,

Mickael

[1] http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/16578/