Point to Point Ethernet

Wed Jul 8 10:01:20 UTC 2009

A few time already I've wished for a fully standardized and vendor
interoperable way of doing a true point to point ethernet link.

It would work just like an old leased line or synchronous serial
interface and completely do away with ARP, MAC addresses and all
that stuff.  Obviously no switches in between would be allowed.
Each side would run in "promiscuous mode" where every ethernet
frame is received and passed up to the network stack (just like
on a serial link).  Since MAC addresses are useless they can be
scrapped and only the ethertype field remains.  This increases
the effective MTU by 12 bytes.

The framing overhead goes away and the packet can directly be
directly placed on the wire without taking a detour through L3->L2
lookup and encapsulation step.

More importantly one can specify the just the outgoing interface
again instead of the next hop:

  ip route 10.0.0.0 255.0.0.0 g0/1

Do you think this is useful?  Maybe vendors will hear me/us.

-- 
Andre