All, I support the ideas expressed in this draft.
In the early part of this century, while working for an equipment supplier that designed their own packet processing chips, I was involved with the design of a packet processing chipset that could handle (even small IP packets) at line rate on 10 Gbps Ethernet interfaces, including parsing the IPv6 header chain and applying L4 filtering ACLs. Adding that ability to parse IPv6 header chains & perform L4 filtering at line-rate on a 10 GigE interface did NOT increase the ASIC gate count enough to change the die size. So there was no recurring manufacturing cost for that feature. As I recall, this implementation could at least parse 128 bytes into the IPv6 header chain. I'm pretty confident that the implementation did not parse any deeper than 255 bytes, and I am certain that it could not parse more than 255 bytes into the header chain. I have heard from several ISPs that a different manufacturer has for some years now (at least 6 years) deployed backbone routers that can at least parse past 1 IPv6 extension header to apply L4 ACLs/filtering -- also at line rate on interfaces operating at 10 Gbps (possibly higher speed by now). One person at that firm has confirmed this ability to me verbally. I'm not certain precisely what the depth of their parsing ability might be. So there are at least two implementations of ASIC/FPGA-based packet processors that can parse IPv6 header chains at 10 Gbps line-rate (possibly higher). I think long term, this capability will be highly desired (and in at least some operational environments, needed). This capability will tend to help encourage IPv6 deployment, because it will help IPv6 L4 ACL implementations perform at a level comparable to IPv4 L4 ACL implementations. This draft provides a significant help both to implementers and operators by providing a specification for a minimum parse depth (i.e. 128 bytes as per Section 4 of this I-D). I hope that this draft is able to move forward as a BCP. Yours, Ran Atkinson -------------------------------------------------------------------- IETF IPv6 working group mailing list ipv6@ietf.org Administrative Requests: https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ipv6 --------------------------------------------------------------------
