"Mike O'Dell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > anyone imagining that ipv6 will get an observable percentage > of total endpoint penetration any time soon only needs to look > at the onslaught of microcontrollers starting to ship with > IPv4 technology integral to them.
Now that I'm in the embedded operating system business, allow me to mention that IPv6 has started showing up as a customer demand item. And no, I didn't induce that. (We ship with v6 of course, but the fact that people have asked us about v6 independently has been an interesting surprise.) > also note that a number of chip makers are doing "hardware" > implementations of ipv4 stacks, up to and through transport > level crypto. Not quite. Chips like the various IBM 4xx series CPUs with pico-processor mixins and and the Intel IXP1200 and such have significant amounts of stack processing built in, but it isn't really hardwired to v4. These "picoprocessors" aren't very smart, but they aren't quite "v4 hardcoded" either. I've seen tell of other units that have v4 hardwired in for purposes like the ones you mention (i.e. smart toasters) but mostly what one finds is that there are units with v4 microcode -- it isn't really in the metal. > ipv6 may eventually be visible, but i predict most people > currently reading this will have grandchildren using ipv4 > technology, whether they want to or not. Entirely possible. However, there will probably be people still using X.25 in 20 years. The question is, though, how many. I would by no means refer to the current number of v6 users as significant from a global market perspective. It isn't. The number of v6 users currently is many orders of magnitude smaller than the v4 world. However, nothing like this happens instantly, and the TREND is pretty damn astonishing. I hadn't even sent a single v6 packet a couple of years ago, and now many of my geek friends have v6 running in their homes and offices, and I didn't give them help OR prompt them. What's more, they've actually got a use for v6 for things like NAT penetration. They can ssh to a specific machine in their home network even though the cable modem only has one v4 address to give out. Now we're talking about a tiny number of systems experts here who're either using open source OSes or were (before XP) patient enough to install the MS Research stack, but it is very different from the days a couple of years ago where even v6 hackers never used v6. Hell, I roamed onto a university campus wireless network not that long ago, and for the hell of it sent out a router discovery message and found myself on the 6bone. No, not quite the same as finding my dentist using v6, but an astonishing trend, even from the point of view of my wildest dreams. I think we're still going to be below "observable user threshold" for a while to come even while this growth continues. How long? I'm planning on doing some quantitative analysis for a talk I'm giving in a few weeks. I'll try posting results when I have them. Off the cuff, I don't expect anything to show up in network statistics for a year or two, but I'll know better soon. -- Perry E. Metzger [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- NetBSD Development, Support & CDs. http://www.wasabisystems.com/
