Hi,
It's not clear to me what problem is meant to be solved
by draft-vanmook-intarea-ipv6-resolved-gateway.
IPv4 routes with IPv6 next hop are supported on at least some equipment,
and do not require a special address allocation, or any other standards
action.
You can simply place an IPv6 address in the next-hop field of a route
and it already works. For example on Linux: ip route add 0.0.0.0/0 via
2001:db8:1::1
This is fairly trivial because IP forwarding doesn't actually use the
next-hop IP address. It only gets used to look up the egress interface
and the layer-2 address (very often an Ethernet MAC address) of the next
hop. Those are the parameters that are actually needed when forwarding.
It's trivial to use the lookup result from one IP version to forward
packets from the other IP version. It's only a matter of whether the
software supports it. No silicon changes are needed since this is
generally not done by ASICs AFAIK.
The draft mentions a desire to completely eliminate IPv4 subnetting and
ARP in the local segment - this can already be done with the existing
mechanism.
I'm not sure if this behaviour is standard. If not, it might be useful
to publish an RFC describing it anyway. But there would be no need for
any number allocations.
The only real use I can see for the address allocation in the draft is
to automatically configure DHCP clients to use their IPv6 default
gateway for IPv4 packets. Are we sure that a special sentinel address is
the right way to signal this? It could be a new DHCP option (although
unused codes appear to be scarce), or a behaviour of dual-stack DHCP
clients whenever DHCP doesn't specify an IPv4 router but there is an
IPv6 router.
Kevin
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