Pascal,

Comments in line.

On Thu, Nov 11, 2021 at 10:58 AM Pascal Thubert (pthubert)
<[email protected]> wrote:
>
> +1 .
>
> To Ole that without a good use case in a limited domain it’s hard to expect 
> implementation.
>
Unfortunately, TLVs weren't interesting enough when the protocol was
defined so now we have a lot of deployed hardware that couldn't
support them even if they wanted. There are two things that give me
hope for the future in that regard: 1) The emergence of programmable
hardware datapaths may eventually limit the need for hardware swap out
everytime someone wants to support a new protocol 2) TCP has always
has TLVs as a core part of the protocol, as hardware implementation
move up the stack they are going to need to deal with TLVs (like it
someone wanted to build a high performance NVMe/TCP stack in
hardware).

> To the point that the HbH must remain simple to operate and very short, same 
> spirit as already demonstrated with SRH.
>
> We’re in a weird situation with arbitrary limits in vendor silicon because 
> the IETF failed to give clear directions on EH sizes.
>
> It would be neat to provide a roadmap of how long the minimum EH size to 
> parse should be so the IETF can design things that can be later implemented 
> by the vendors.

That is precisely the intent of
https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-herbert-6man-eh-limits-00.txt :-)

Tom

>
> Regards,
>
> Pascal
>
> Le 11 nov. 2021 à 18:34, [email protected] a écrit :
>
> Tom,
>
> [...]
>
> I think you're dancing around the core problem. Hardware
>
> implementations didn't support Hop-by-Hop options because they contain
>
> TLVs which are considered to be hard to process in a high performance
>
> datapath hardware pipeline. RFC2460 did mandate that all intermediate
>
> nodes need to process the HBH options which left hardware vendors with
>
> three choices: 1) process them in a software slow path and adhere to
>
> RFC2460 2) ignore them altogether and violate RFC2460 3) drop the
>
> packet which technically adheres to RFC2460, but obviously kills any
>
> utility of feature. RFC8200 relaxed the requirement for all nodes to
>
> process HBH options and acknowledged that this is reality. From an
>
> application perspective, if the TLVs can't be processed in a "fast
>
> path" it is best to ignore the options.
>
>
> I mostly agree with your reasoning.
> To add some more nuance. The only TLV that existed was Router Altert for MLD, 
> and that was a signal to send the packet to the control plane.
> I think the reason HBH isn't implemented in hardware is because there aren't 
> any options in existence. Until quite recently.
> And those mainly apply in a limited domain.
>
> If a transit network supported some specific forwarding behavour triggered by 
> the HBH option, it would be highly unlikely that it would allow arbitrary 
> end-users to use that function.
>
> To conclude. HBH hasn't been implemented in hardware because there hasn't 
> been a use case.
>
> Cheers,
> Ole
>
>
>
>
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