Simple Ethernet bridging

Since our SAMA5D3 Xplained board has two Ethernet ports on board, it's quite interesting presenting a brief example of how we can set up a networking bridge on it in such a way as to connect two separate LANs into a single one. The idea is to set up our board in such a way that it can work as if it was (more or less) an Ethernet switch so that two separate LANs are physically merged into a bigger one in a transparent manner (that is, no special settings should be done on the networked devices on both LANs).

Note

For further information regarding what a bridge is, you should start by visiting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridging_(networking) .

First of all, we need the package named bridge-utils, which holds the needed commands to enable the bridging functionality. The package holds the brctl command, which is used to set up our bridge (if it is missing, we can install the package using the usual installation commands).

Creating the bridge is quite simple. First...