Subject: Re: [RFC] ARP notify option

From: Stephen Hemminger <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 6 Mar 2007 14:52:41 -0800

On Tue, 06 Mar 2007 15:18:07 -0600
"Chris Friesen" <[email-masked]> wrote:

> Stephen Hemminger wrote:
> 
> > +arp_notify - BOOLEAN
> > +	Define mode for notification of address and device changes.
> > +	0 - (default): do nothing
> > +	1 - Generate gratuitous arp replies when device is brought up
> > +	    or hardware address changes.
> 
> Did you consider using gratuitous arp requests instead?  I remember 
> reading about some hardware that updated its arp cache on gratuitous 
> requests but not gratuitous replies.
> 
> Chris

I copied the ARP generation from other places that were doing
gratuitous ARP already:  Xen and irlan.
Our local switch used REPLY's to do the same thing.

One could imagine making it a ternary value and having 2 generate
REQUEST's.

-- 
Stephen Hemminger <[email-masked]>