Michael Thomas wrote:
>
> Brian E Carpenter writes:
> > The only concrete proposals I have ever seen for use of the Flow Label
> > are for QOS. Everything else has been hand-waving. We need to decide.
> > It's unthinkable to leave this big mystery gap in the middle of the
> > IPv6 header.
>
> You know, this reminds me of having a bright shiney
> quarter burning to be spent by virtue of the fact
> that it's there. The eight bits in the ip4 header
> for TOS were standardized but not widely
> implemented. That allowed us to go back
> 20 years later with a little bit more time and
> understanding to create a solution that's at
> least plausible. Considering that most QoS is
> still at the leap of faith stage, prudence
> seems like a perfectly reasonable stance.
>
> Mike
Plenty, including your company, have used the TOS bits, for CoS, long
before the Diffserv effort.
I do not think we can afford to reserve 20 bits in the IPv6 main header.
IPv6 forwarding and QoS processing at line speeds, at 10G or higher, are
very challenging efforts. The Network Layer header must be used
efficiently for what is needed. Fields can always be re-defined, or
re-used, on a per need basis, in the future.
Alex
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