(02-14-2015, 10:31 PM)slugdude Wrote: Regarding port multipliers: There will be no official support for these, but they can act like devices, which then direct packets to further devices. The addresses used for these must be inside the data section of the standards or it will screw around with the rest of the network. Sending packets that do not follow the standards may cause undesirable results.
Due to the way switches work, you can have an extra switch(es) on your plot if you want one (So that you can have more than 3 devices) but they will have different addresses.
The 8-bit addresses are now in two parts.
000000 00
The first 6 is the address of your hub. The last two are which port on the hub the destination device is connected to. This saves space in the switch memory since it only needs to store the first 6 bits, and the two-bit direction, a total of 8 bits. Before, each set of memory would have to store 8 bits plus the 2 bit direction (10 bits).
This does, however, mean that the maximum number of hubs connected to the network is 63. You cannot have an address of 000000XX because that is the address used for the assigning of an an address to a hub. (The hub will send a packet with address 00000000 and a manually set source address to it's switch, which will remember the address and where it came from, and resend that packet to other switches.)