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bridge.4: improve VLAN documentation
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Authored by ivy on Sun, Jul 6, 8:24 PM.
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Details

Summary

Consider this a draft; there are probably other things we want to
mention and perhaps the wording could be improved.

  • Document both "legacy" and "VLAN filtering" bridges, but steer users towards VLAN filtering bridges, because this configuration is better in 99% of cases.
  • Document the interaction between bridge(4) and vlan(4) which is confusing if you don't know what's going on. I haven't gone so far as to say configuring bridge(4) and vlan(4) on the same interface is unsupported, mainly because VLAN filtering bridges solve this problem anyway.
  • Provides some examples of VLAN filtering bridges, and examples of how to migrate from legacy bridges.

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Event Timeline

ivy requested review of this revision.Sun, Jul 6, 8:24 PM

This is awesome!

share/man/man4/bridge.4
279

Should we use filtered and unfiltered, or some other descriptive title? Using legacy as a name instead of an adjective gets a bit confusing, and doesn't age well if it's still around when a third idea comes out.

308

Should we use RFC style language to improve semantic density?

314

Does it make sense to put numbered examples in an EXAMPLES section?

347

Putting macros in titles is discouraged per mdoc(7)

share/man/man4/bridge.4
279

i'm open to other names for the "legacy" bridge configuration, but i'm not sure "unfiltered" really works: an "unfiltered bridge" is not a thing anyone knows about, so it's not very descriptive. "legacy" at least implies "this is the old way of doing it".

i would be open to something like "basic bridge" and "VLAN filtering bridge", except i don't really like "basic bridge", but perhaps there's another word we could use here?

308

unless we use that language in other manual pages (which i don't think we do?) i don't think that is more clear.

314

i thought about this and i really prefer having examples inline here, rather than referring to the EXAMPLES section, because it makes it easier for the reader to understand what's going on. trying to explain the configuration without being able to show actual ifconfig commands is quite difficult and ends up being more verbose and less explanatory, at least in my experience. but i'm open to other ways of doing this if you have a better suggestion.

347

noted, but then what is the preferred formatting here?

share/man/man4/bridge.4
340

note to self: typo, "a separate STP instances"

fix some instances of ye olde Britishe Englische

be consistent about "frames" vs "packets" and "Ethernet address" vs "MAC address"

be more clear about how STP works when a vlan(4) is in a bridge.

Suggested by: adrian

Nothing jumps out to me regarding spelling and grammar. I'd like someone more familiar with the topic to review the content.

share/man/man4/bridge.4
559

Audience check: how well understood is the DMZ acronym as it relates to networks?

This revision is now accepted and ready to land.Thu, Jul 10, 7:16 PM
share/man/man4/bridge.4
279

I do not have any alternative names to propose but I think almost anything is better than legacy almost all the time.

296

Consider using an appositive instead of nested parentheticals. I think appositives always read more clearly than parentheticals, and especially nested parentheticals.

347

Titles shouldn't have cross-references. I'm not sure I understand this clearly, maybe not because of your writing but just because I'm not a network engineer, but maybe something like "Configuring VLAN-aware bridges" or
"Understanding bridge VLAN capture"?

398

Also consider using an appositive.

559

Almost all of this is well over my head except DMZ. Afaik DMZ is the first thing they teach you about networking.

This revision now requires review to proceed.Fri, Jul 11, 2:51 AM
share/man/man4/bridge.4
296

since we never use the acronym again i've just removed it, and we can also remove "sometimes called" since this term comes from 802.1Q, so it's always called that.

347

this section is about a specific interaction between bridge(4) and vlan(4) in FreeBSD, not about VLANs in general, so i think that should be reflected in the title. i've changed it to use "if_bridge and if_vlan" to make that a bit more clear without using Xr.

398

the wording here was redundant, so i've changed it to simply say what it meant.

559

i think anyone reading this will know what a DMZ is, but that's a detail that isn't actually relevant to the example, so i've reworded it to talk about "isolated networks" instead.