Hi all. I’m wondering which method would be better for hardware routing on the crs3xx hardware, specifically the netpower 16p
a) leave everything in a bridge, turn on vlan filtering and ingress filtering, set the site’s backhaul port to a VLAN and add IP and routing config on that VLAN
or
b) just remove the backhaul’s port from the bridge and set IP etc on the ‘natural’ port.
Thoughts? Any performance differences you think might pop out? I’m leaning on ‘a’ here because it would allow me to also push other VLANs over the port if I want without extra bridging etc.
This scheme won’t allow for HW offload of any kind (neither L2 nor L3). L3 HW routing only works if ports in question are all logically handled by switch chip directly. And that is achieved by configuring ports as members of same bridge.
This statement is not entirely true. L3HW routing can run directly on a switch port. There is no need to put a port under Bridge/VLAN unless required. However, hardware VLAN tagging requires a bridge, so you cannot assign a VLAN interface directly on a switch port - there must be a bridge in-between. But if all you need is hardware routing on a standalone VLAN-unaware port - go ahead and do it.
Performance-wise, both cases are almost identical.