[97648] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: The Choice: IPv4 Exhaustion or Transition to IPv6
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bora Akyol)
Thu Jun 28 18:07:39 2007
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2007 14:54:22 -0700
From: Bora Akyol <bora.akyol@aprius.com>
To: <Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu>
Cc: "Steven M. Bellovin" <smb@cs.columbia.edu>,
brett watson <brett@the-watsons.org>, <nanog@merit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <19138.1183067213@turing-police.cc.vt.edu>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
The length of the address (64 vs 128) is not the hard part. Just increases
the cost and the complexity of the ASIC ;-)
The extension headers become a real problem when L4 filtering is desired.
Bora
On 6/28/07 2:46 PM, "Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu" <Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu>
wrote:
> On Thu, 28 Jun 2007 13:08:52 PDT, Bora Akyol said:
>> At a very low, hardware centric level, IPv6 would be a lot easier to
>> implement if
>>
>> 1) The addresses were 64 bits instead of 128 bits.
>> 2) The extension headers architecture was completely revamped to be more
>> hardware friendly.
>
> Wow, a blast from the past. The *current* IPv6 design was selected to a
> good extent because it was *easier* to do in hardware than some of the other
> contenders. You think 64 versus 128 is tough - think about the ASIC fun and
> games to support *variable length* addresses (not necessarily even a multiple
> of 4 bytes, in some of the proposals. Could be 7, could be 11, check the
> address length field for details. Yee. Hah).
