Canonical vs Non-canonical
Canonical Form Canonical form (also known as " LSB format " and " Ethernet format ") is the name given to the format of a LAN adapter address as it should be presented to the user according to the 802 LAN standard. It is best defined as how the bit order of an adapter address on the LAN media maps to the bit order of an adapter address in memory: The first bit of each byte that appears on the LAN maps to the least significant(i.e., right-most ) bit of each byte in memory (the figure below illustrates this). This puts the group address indicator (i.e., the bit that defines whether an address is unicast or multicast) in the least significant bit of the first byte. Ethernet and 802.3 hardware behave consistently with this definition. Unfortunately, Token Ring (and some FDDI) hardware does not behave consistently with this definition; it maps the first bit of each byte of the adapter address to the most significant(i.e., left-most ) bit of each byte in memory, which ...