On 2 May, 2012, at 14:49 , Mouse wrote: >> After spending some time thinking about what would be required to >> implement branes as part of the SMP networking project, [...] > > What's a brane in this context? The only meaning I'm familiar with for > the term is from particle physics and makes no sense here. I did a > little searching, and, while my Web-fu is admittedly weak, I didn't > find anything the least bit helpful.
I think I've only seen the term used here. It seems to refer to a multiple routing table, or routing instance, mechanism, which I understand, but appears to be laden with additional, implied policy semantics concerning the use of the mechanism, which I don't quite understand. The term "VRF" is used by router vendors for essentially the identical mechanism (i.e. more than one routing table), but that term is loaded with what seem to be an entirely different set of policy assumptions concerning what the mechanism will be used for, assumptions also different from, say, NAT, which is another router thing which is usefully (but not necessarily) structured around a multiple routing instances. Assuming this is correct, I'll admit that I much prefer thinking about the bare underlying mechanism and its associated configuration, trying to make the latter rich enough that a user can configure his own way to whatever policy he would like to use the mechanism to implement without strong a priori assumptions about what that policy will be. I stumble over the "processes get chroot'd into branes" thing that always seems to arise in conversations about branes since, for most of the applications of multiple routing instances that I understand, this is not very useful. Dennis Ferguson
