MAC address

[seibert]

Feedback has been that having a special MAC address type would also be useful for the same use cases as IP addresses.

Data layout

MAC addresses are 48-bits, so we will store them zero padded in a 64 bit word.

String form

MAC addresses should be displayed in colon separated hexadecimal. Ex: 00:50:56:c0:00:01. When parsing strings into the MAC address data type, both upper and lower case hexadecimal should be accepted, as well as the usage of ":" or "-" as byte separators.

Operations

Under a .mac namespace, operations like:

• is_multicast
• as_int (is this the right name?): Reinterpret MAC address as uint64. Allows user to do custom manipulation of MAC address with bit operations
• oui: Extract 24 bit OUI as integer