IP address on bridged interface

Hello,

I am currently playing with bridging to learn about various possibilities to setup a bridge to enable networking for KVM guests.

I learned that I cannot use an IP address on one of the bridged interfaces but have to assign that IP address to the bridge interface if I want to use it to reach the bridge itself.

The documentation I found does not say much about this subject and I am wondering whether there are situations when I can use IP addresses on bridged interfaces or if it absolutely makes no sense to have an IP address assigned to a bridged interface.

Any explanation or pointers are very welcome.

Dirk

Normally it does not make sense to put any L3 protocol address on port interfaces - because incoming packets are diverted to the bridge interface before the L3 protocol is examined. This means the L3 protocol running on the port interface will never see any incoming packets.

There are a few rare circumstances where it makes sense to have IP addresses on the port interfaces - it can be done with the use of the ebtables BROUTE chain - this allows one to selectively pass frames to the L3 protocol decode on a port rather than passing them to the bridge interface. One situation where I have used this trick is on an NFS root mounted networking device. On kernel boot the kernel NFS code assigns an IP address directly to the ethernet port. Once my networking code starts it creates a bridge and puts the ethernet port into the bridge. This stops the NFS root mount from working, and the machine halts. The work around is to put an ebtables rule in place to allow the NFS root mount IP address to continue working.

Simon

Meanwhile, I played with a one-port setup that works with an IP address (out of 192.168.106.0/24) only on the port interface:

brctl addbr br0
ip link set br0 up

# delete the network-route via the eth0 interface
ip route del 192.168.106.0/24
ip route add default dev br0
brctl addif br0 eth0

After I put the one and only interface eth0 into this experimental "bridge", network connections are possible as if eth0 was used directly. As br0 does not have an L3 protocol address, isn't it the port interface eth0 that sees the L3 packets in this case?

Dirk