The routers I used to work with did things a bit different. From what I can tell, creating a bridge and adding interfaces to it is essentially the same thing as adding slave interfaces to a master interface.
Is that just toe different ways to skin the cat or am I missing something obvious here?
They are different. With bridge all traffic goes through the cpu - the upside is you can apply bridge filters and also ip firewall, but you will be limited in speed by the cpu.
With slave ports you use the switch chip - the upside is your traffic goes directly at wire speed, but the filters are limited to what the switch chip can do.
Ah, makes perfect sense to me when you put it like that. I think that could be better explained in the manual because I sure didn’t pick up on that difference (which is kind of important tbh).