@barryf
So I’m not going crazy :-/
It’s like the Topaz chip will only operate the ports in “switch” mode and somehow over-rides the sw bridging’s usual operation. Just guessing here.
Not yet at least :-\
Note that “ifconfig br0 down” (or “ip link br0 down”) stops the bridging. “up” resumes.
So either the bridge driver is working closely with the hardware bridge switch chip, or we are just not listening at the right layer at the stack.
Time to read some kernel source code.