batman-adv applying for an official Ethertype?

Hi Folks

Has anybody investigated the process for applying for an approved Ethertype as needed by batman advanced?

I found a few relevant documents:

http://standards.ieee.org/regauth/
http://standards.ieee.org/regauth/ethertype/type-tut.html
http://standards.ieee.org/regauth/faqs.html#q15

Not cheap :-(

Andrew

Hi,

Yes, Simon did a small research some months ago.

We know about it. Nobody gave us the money yet... and I think it will never happen that a rich boy come to us and give us that money just for 16 bit... but I would pay the $15.00 bank fee :)

http://open-mesh.net/wiki/2008-12-28-batman-adv-0-1-release

Best regards,
Sven

The fee is about equivalent to 3 man days of work. So its not that big a sum for a commercial entity wanting to use batman in a product.

However, when i posed this question, i had Linux mainline in the back of my head. Would batman get into mainline when it is using an unofficial ethertype? I guess i need to see if any other protocol is using an unofficial ethertype.

Andrew

Hey Andrew,

i'm only aware of ether-wake which uses 0x8042 as (unregistered) ethertype to send WOL packets and was obviously used in scyld beowulf systems according to the manpage [1]. Wireshark also recognizes these packets [2].

I know this ethertype because we used this ethertype in our first batman-adv implementations as well (because it is such a nice number ...). ;)

Maybe we find someone funding the money for the ethertype some time, but currently i don't know anyone who would be interested in this.

According to the Ethertype list from the IEEE [3], our ethertype 0x4305 is currently not in use, so the chance to collide is quite low.

best regards,
Simon

[1] http://linux.die.net/man/8/ether-wake
[2] http://wiki.wireshark.org/WakeOnLAN
[3] http://standards.ieee.org/regauth/ethertype/eth.txt