Scott,
Scott Bradner wrote:
>
> I've been watching the discussion over the IPv6 flow label for a while
> and (like Perry) have yet to see anything I woukd call a real reason
> to be doing anything with it - specifically I've seen no vendors say what
> specific use they would put a FL to.
I have discussed the flow label with product designers. They are ignoring
it because the words in RFC 2460 are fuzzy. Yet the IESG has approved
two standards track documents (RFC 2205 and the diffserv MIB) with
specific uses for the flow label in support of the IETF's two QOS
solutions.
We've inadvertently set up a situation where no vendor is going
to speak up.
>
> I find it hard to see why so much time is being spent on this other
> than the fear that idle bits are the devil's playground - i.e. the
> fear of unassigned bits in the header -
A number of us believe that the above fuzziness and inconsistency
needs to be resolved, one way or the other.
> I'd rather wait until
> we are real sure that 1/ there is one or more use(s) for the FL that
> consensus can be reached on,
As noted, we've already standardised two...
> 2/ have some understanding on what the FL
> characteristics are for those uses
afaik this is the case: locally unique, immutable, and (for intserv)
IANA-assigned as per RFC 3140.
>
> Over the last few years I have seen suggestions ranging from the original
> idea of ofloading router forwarding engines (hard to justify in an era
> of ASIC-based and network processor-based forwarders, to an ID for the
> owner of the content of a packet, to QoS lables (which are hard to
> diferentiate from difserv code points in teh real world), to billing
> information. None of these have presented a compelling reason to think
> that we understand any FL use well enough to define anything now.
Disagree. The QOS usages are clear and well-defined. The others are all
pretty dumb.
Brian
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