I believe Christian's proposal is quite viable. However I want to think a bit
more about this, since there may actually be a solution much closer to
"no change" - I just don't feel quite ready to write it down yet, but I
suspect we can actually achieve the same effect without labels.
One more comment below:
Christian Huitema wrote:
>
> > With the current flow label semantics the routers can avoid doing
> > intserv
> > state lookup if the flow label is null. If the flow label is used for
> > path
> > distribution, the router will be searching for the intserv state for
> > all the
> > packets (assuming the router does intserv at all). So from this
> > point-of-view it might be better to designate a separate label type
> > for
> > intserv?
>
> That should be a question for the Intserv WG. Either they can live with
> the default mechanism, or they expand the effort of specifying their own
> solution. I have no personal preference on this subject.
>
> > What I'm aiming at is to see if a classifying router (intserv,
> > diffserv, or other) could be ignorant of the different flow label
> > types when doing the lookup based on the 3-tuple of the source
> > address, destination address and the 20 bit flow label.
That depends quite critically on the extent to which the standard
limits the semantics of the field. A classifier is a dumb animal
driven by a simple configuration table; the real work is done
after classification. So there is a good chance this condition
can be met (with unrecognised labels reverting to default
treatment, as Christian says).
Brian
> That is indeed debatable. My proposal is to treat any non-understood
> label as if it had been null; an alternate proposal could be to treat
> any non-understood label as a basic label. Again, I don't have a strong
> preference, we just need to pick one specification.
>
> -- Christian Huitema
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