I've been watching the discussion over the IPv6 flow label for a while and (like Perry) have yet to see anything I woukd call a real reason to be doing anything with it - specifically I've seen no vendors say what specific use they would put a FL to.
I find it hard to see why so much time is being spent on this other than the fear that idle bits are the devil's playground - i.e. the fear of unassigned bits in the header - I'd rather wait until we are real sure that 1/ there is one or more use(s) for the FL that consensus can be reached on, 2/ have some understanding on what the FL characteristics are for those uses Over the last few years I have seen suggestions ranging from the original idea of ofloading router forwarding engines (hard to justify in an era of ASIC-based and network processor-based forwarders, to an ID for the owner of the content of a packet, to QoS lables (which are hard to diferentiate from difserv code points in teh real world), to billing information. None of these have presented a compelling reason to think that we understand any FL use well enough to define anything now. ymmv Scott -------------------------------------------------------------------- IETF IPng Working Group Mailing List IPng Home Page: http://playground.sun.com/ipng FTP archive: ftp://playground.sun.com/pub/ipng Direct all administrative requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------
