The NIC bridge provides multiple sessions of the 'Nic' service while using a
single 'Nic' session for forwarding requests. It implements a flavour of the
Proxy-ARP protocol (rfc1027). That means it allocates a virtual MAC address for
each client. Whenever a client sends a packet, NIC bridge changes the sender's
MAC address to the one it memorized for the client. Moreover, it monitors DHCP
packets, and tracks the IP addresses assigned to each of its clients. Whenever
ARP packets come from the outside, NIC bridge will answer them with the
corresponding MAC address.
By adding a 'mac' attribute to the 'nic_bridge' config node: one can define the
first MAC address from which the NIC bridge will allocate MACs for its clients.
For example:
! <config mac="02:02:02:02:02:00"/>
Note that the least relevant byte will be ignored. NIC bridge will use it for
enumerating its clients, starting from 0.
Normally, NIC bridge is expected to be used in scenarios where an DHCP server
is available. However, there are situations where the use of static IPs for
virtual NICs is useful. For example, when using the NIC bridge to create a
virtual network between the lighttpd web server and the Arora web browser, both
running as Genode processes without real network connectivity.
The static IP can be configured per client of the NIC bridge using a '<policy>'
node of the configuration. For example, the following policy assigns a static
address to a client with the session label "lighttpd".
!<start name="nic_bridge">
! ...
! <config>
! <policy label="lighttpd" ip_addr="10.0.2.55"/>
! </config>
!</start>
Of course, the client needs to configure its TCP/IP stack to use the assigned
IP address. This can be done via configuration arguments examined by the
'lwip_nic_dhcp' libc plugin. For the given example, the configuration for the
lighttpd process would look as follows.
!<start name="lighttpd">
! <config>
! <interface ip_addr="10.0.2.55"
! netmask="255.255.255.0"
! gateway="10.0.2.1"/>
! </config>
!</start>
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