Hi Joel,
On 2009-08-05 03:08, Joel M. Halpern wrote: > It has become clear with the passage of time that the description of the > flow label in the original IPv6 specs served only to convince everyone > not to use that field for anything. Even now, no one is sure what to do > with it. If you're referring to the lame appendix to RFC2460, that's exactly why we wrote RFC3697. My understanding is that some stacks do set the flow label according to the SHOULD in RFC3697, but I'm not aware of any deployed use cases (such as load balancing routers). The gap is not in the basic specs but in exploitation. It's very similar to what happened with the IPv4 TOS byte, and that took 20 years before we (a) defined it properly and (b) began to see limited deployment, as corporate VoIP took off. My expectation has always been that exploitation of the flow label would stay on the back burner until IPv6 deployment reached a significant level, because there isn't much benefit in optimising flow handling for <1% of the traffic. So I don't really see anything odd in the current situation. That said, I can't see any reason why ITRs and ETRs can't use the flow label among themselves, in a way completely compatible with RFC3697. But if their hardware engines can't include the flow label in the n-tuple, that's a problem. Brian -------------------------------------------------------------------- IETF IPv6 working group mailing list ipv6@ietf.org Administrative Requests: https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ipv6 --------------------------------------------------------------------