Tom,
On 22/04/2015 03:42, Tom Herbert wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 20, 2015 at 9:05 PM, Brian E Carpenter
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>>> IPv6 flow label has been proposed as an entropy field for load
>>> balancing in IPv6 network environment [RFC6438].  However, as stated
>>> in [RFC6936], the end-to-end use of flow labels for load balancing is
>>> a long-term solution and therefore the use of load balancing using
>>> the transport header fields would continue until any widespread
>>> deployment is finally achieved.
>>
>> That is a false argument. RFC6438 describes a model where the
>> tunnel end point sets the flow label; that is a much smaller fix
>> to a tunnel end point that converting it to use a new encapsulation
>> such as IP-in-UDP.
> 
> Brian,
> 
> Updating end hosts to set flow labels per RFC6438 is easy (e.g. this
> is supported in Linux stack now). Upgrading all of our switches in the
> network to use flow labels for ECMP and updating all of our NICs to
> use flow labels for RSS is *not* easy-- this assumes that would could
> even find HW that supports labels and are already using IPv6. 

True. But we only make it less likely to happen by proposing a work-around
with bogus port numbers. I don't think that is the IETF showing industry
leadership, exactly. (The same goes for Xiaohu's quote from
https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-rtg-dt-encap-01#page-7 .) If we cop
out, we can certainly rely on the industry following us.

Rgds
   Brian

> Deployed
> devices commonly support hashing UDP tuple for ECMP and RSS. This
> works reliably for both IPv6 and IPv4, and in fact is a major
> motivation for  proposed encapsulation protocols using UDP
> (MPLS-in-UDP, GRE-in-UDP, VXLAN, GUE, Geneve, etc.). Intermediate
> device support for flow labels is still needed, for instance we only
> get 14 bits of entropy in UDP source port (ephemeral port range) which
> is too little for some use cases.
> 
> Tom
> 

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