Does switch flooding equal to broadcast?

[Steve Zhou]

Hi all,

I was a little confused about switch flooding and broadcast, are they the same thing? Broadcast is actually frame with Des.MAC = ALL FF. Let's say a switch port got a unicast but the SW CAM doesn't contain a match entry, then it will flood the frame to all the ports except for the receiving port. Would this SW change the des.MAC to ALL FF, or the des.MAC will stay unchanged with being sent to other ports?

thank you!

[Nagendra Kumar Nainar · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Intermittent switches will not rewrite source/destination MAC address. When any switch receive a frame with destination MAC which is not in local table, will flood to all ports without any change in the frame.

-Nagendra

[Steve Zhou]

thank you, Nagendra.