"Perry E. Metzger" wrote: ... > > I have witnessed firsthand hardware engineers on high end > > platforms react somewhere between disbelief and outright > > hostility at the prospect of chasing down header chains at line > > rate. > > Given the fact that IPv6 headers have to be processed in some > circumstances by routers -- and perhaps most of the time in the future > -- it would seem that they're going to have to cope with their > disbelief. > > Of course, it appears that folks from several vendors already have > coped with this disbelief and have working hardware.
You can do anything, but it costs more money and generates more heat to dissipate. Believe me, the hardware designers *all* react as Michael describes: don't ask them to chase down successive headers as part of the truly optimised line-speed path; that sort of logic will always be behind the game compared with fixed header fields. Brian -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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] --------------------------------------------------------------------
