Transmitting on a Bridge Device
We saw in the section "Bridge Device Abstraction" that the bridge device abstraction requires transmissions on a bridge device to be converted into transmissions on one or all bridge ports. Figure 16-11 shows the key routines that make this happen.
The bridge driver's implementation of hard_start_xmit is br_dev_xmit. The latter
function simply implements the basic logic used by a bridge to transmit. It copies the
frame out of the right bridge port when a lookup in the bridge forwarding database returns
success. On the other hand, it floods the frame on all eligible bridge ports when the
lookup fails, or when the destination MAC address is either an L2 multicast or L2
broadcast address.
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