Brian E Carpenter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Let's either clarify them, as in the one para summary that Tony Hain > sent a few days ago, or simply write the field off as reserved, in which > case IPv6 will have no advantage of IPv4 for QOS purposes.
I think the notion of making our protocols better for QoS purposes is an admirable one. My problem is that I don't think anyone has well demonstrated that the flow label *will* give us an advantage for QoS purposes. I understand the arguments. I just haven't seen anyone step up with the crucial "we at large router vendor have done the experiment and even though we have to reach into the packet anyway to do tuple extraction having this in a percentage of the packets will increase performance in this quantitative way." I'll repeat (broken-record like), we've already deployed the end point implementations in the field. We can't change those stacks at this point. By the way, as I've often said: the killer app for IPv6 is not QoS or security or anything else -- all those can be achieved (though sometimes with greater effort) in IPv4. The killer app for IPv6 is having an internet again. The mere fact that any user of IPv6 can reasonably expect to receive as well as to make connections, because they have a globally routable address, is a profound change from today's network in which the end to end principle is rapidly disintegrating. It is, to use my standard metaphor, like a phone network where most people can only call out -- hardly a good thing. Or to put it another way, you can't connect to your home machine and download that report you were working on the previous night but forgot to bring with you if it is behind a NAT box on your cable modem. That's why you need IPv6 -- so you'll have an internet, not because it is better at QoS. Perry -- Perry E. Metzger [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- NetBSD Development, Support & CDs. http://www.wasabisystems.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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] --------------------------------------------------------------------
