Turtles on the Wire: Understanding How the OS Uses the Modern NIC (2016)
Great article! A lot of this is way beyond me, but I&#x27;m generally interested in the process of how a NIC filters based on MAC addresses.<p>I&#x27;m in the humanities and certain scholars working with culture and technology love to make a huge deal about data leakage and how intertwined we all are precisely because you can put a NIC in promiscuous mode and cap packets that weren&#x27;t meant for you. The whole point is that because your NIC is constantly receiving data meant for others (i.e. because it&#x27;s filtering the MAC addresses), something like privacy on networks is always problematic. I&#x27;ve always found the whole point somewhat overstated.<p>So, could anyone explain real quick the process of how a NIC decides whether a packet&#x2F;frame is actually bound for it or link some good resources? For example, does the NIC automatically store the frame&#x2F;packet in a buffer, then read the header, and then decide to discard? Or can it read the header before storing the rest of the frame? How much has been read at the point the NIC decides to drop it or move it up the stack? Reading all of every packet seems improbable to me because if it were the case, laptop 1 (awake but not downloading anything) would experience significant battery drain due to constantly filtering network traffic that was meant for laptop 2. I&#x27;m not sure that really maps to my experience. Also, I assume there are also differences for LAN vs WiFi?<p>Any help on the matter would be greatly appreciated! I&#x27;ve tried google diving on this question many times before and it&#x27;s really hard to find much on it.