> Ted, I asked a question about a feature that is considered critical in
> every routing environment that I am familiar with.

I think that we all have different pictures of what a homenet will look
like.  Some of us appear to believe that homenets will predominantly
consist of wired links with a few WiFi access points at the edges, while
others (including myself) think that as soon as we give the hungry masses
the ability to build self-configuring networks that are efficiently routed
at layer 3, people will start building networks where wireless is used for
transit.

This is exciting stuff, Alia, more exciting than some of the contributors
to this list seem to realise.

Now the only goal of ECMP is to improve performance.  If the homenet uses
only wired links for transit, then ECMP is easy to do, whether in IS-IS or
in Babel.  If, however, the homenet is using multiple mutually interfering
radio links for transit, then a naive implementation of ECMP will actually
decrease performance due to interference (cross-link collisions).  Doing
ECMP in the particular case of non-interfering paths (e.g. wired paths)
should be safe, and the radio interference extension to Babel should
already carry all the required information.

Thankfully, ECMP does not have to be a Homenet requirement -- if the ECMP
extension is backwards compatible (and there's no reason why that
shouldn't be the case), then we can simply leave it as an implementation
option, and let the market decide.

I realise you're impatient to see ECMP in Homenet, Alia, but my main
priorities right now are to satisfy the requirements of the IETF
secretariate wrt. the Babel extension drafts (I've missed the IANA
requirements in one of the drafts), getting shncpd into shape for
integration into Debian, and helping with the Babel/Bird implementation --
and teaching starts in two weeks!  Please give me a few months until
things calm down a little.

-- Juliusz

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