>>>>> "Joel" == Joel M Halpern <j...@joelhalpern.com> writes:
Joel> It has become clear with the passage of time that the
Joel> description of the flow label in the original IPv6 specs
Joel> served only to convince everyone not to use that field for
Joel> anything. Even now, no one is sure what to do with it.
Joel> To propose that encapsulators should use this field to mark
Joel> the flows would seem reasonable. The problem is that since
Joel> that was not done in the first place, as I understand it,
Joel> router vendors concluded that the only sensible thing to do
Joel> was to ignore the field, and do load balancing on ports just
Joel> like we did on IPv4.
IPV6 deployment is fairly low. It seems likely that most of the
equipment that will be used to forward IPV6 traffic has not yet been
built, and that while we definitely need to work with today's
equipment, I think it is safe to say that 10, 15, 20 years from now,
the things we optimize for will be different. so, if we find new best
practices for encapsulators today, we should write them down, try them
out and build consensus.
That way, 3-4 years from now we may be in a position to recommend
forwarders do something different and 10-15 years from now, rely on
that
Naturally, any such discussion should have a sufficiently broad
audience to be useful.
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