Can anyone confirm that this is not strictly correct?

My understanding is that only "t" indicates that packets are tagged, and that "*" only indicates PVID as per the next section:

This means that "3u", "3*" and "3u*" are meaningful with the latter two having the additional meaning that the PVID of port 3 is assigned this VLAN.

After some more poking around, I see that the documentation is incorrect.

Some detailed notes can be found in https://dev.openwrt.org/ticket/7268 and poking around in swlib.c.

Under switch_vlan, the option ports line only uses 't' to indicate if packets on this VLAN are tagged. The source code shows that all other suffixes (in particular '*' and 'u') are ignored. This example shows that port 4 belongs to VLAN 2 (VID is 2 by default, use option 'pvid' here to to override), and outbound packets are not tagged on this port.

config 'switch_vlan'

        option 'device' 'rtl8366rb'
        option 'vlan' '2'
        option 'ports' '4 5t'

To specify the PVID to be applied to all untagged packets received by a port, use option pvid under switch_port. This example shows port 4 is assigned a PVID of 2, meaning that untagged inbound packets on port 4 are assigned a VID of 2 (which was associated with VLAN 2 as shown above).

config 'switch_port'

        option 'port' '4'
        option 'pvid' '2'

The switch_port directive is not applicable to all drivers, in fact only to rtl8366s afaik.

The Atheros switch drivers (should) also support the switch_port options, just with less options (iirc 'pvid' only (besides the port option , no led control or anything else).

I think you are right, iirc the '*' is supported by broadcom kmod-switch style drivers only. It is used to set the default VLAN for untagged frames on a port.

Edit: Feel free to correct it, it's a wiki after all

(Last edited by KanjiMonster on 18 Feb 2011, 21:26)

Yeah, I wanted some feedback to see if I was on the right track to avoid confusing the issue even more.