Using The New Bridges of FreeBSD 15

I certainly appreciate FreeBSD catching up with Linux in its networking features both because I like FreeBSD and because monocultures are bad.

I also find it odd how in Linux, VLAN-aware bridges have to be managed with bridge — you can create them with ip link add name my-bridge type bridge vlan_filtering 1 but then you add VLAN port settings with something like bridge vlan add vid 100-200 dev eth0.

Why would anyone reintroduce a problem from the era of ifconfig/brctl/vconfig/etc. era after unifying everything under ip? I'm not a big fan of BSD ifconfig syntax but at least it's consistent.

I've played around with FreeBSD's bridge(4) and epair(4) interfaces to run VNET jails and find them very helpful, albeit with a reduction in network performance. Like the author, I looked at the "jib" script for ideas, but implemented what I needed in jail.conf(5) configuration.

I haven't yet played with VLANs, but I'm glad it doesn't look too complicated.

Surprisingly, I managed to find a bug in the interaction between bridge and epair that broke ICMPv6 (and possibly ICMP, I don't know) that has since been fixed. The bug exists in 15.0-RELEASE, but can be worked around using -txcsum6 as described in a reply to my bug report.