Mark Smith wrote:
Do you have examples of such hardware / chipsets ? I'd think it'd have
to be really, really old not to have basic multicast and promiscous
capabilities. I'd wonder about the value of introducing layer 2
broadcasts into IPv6 just to cater for such old and rare hardware.
I tend to agree. We need a reality check here. If the problem is with Ethernet cards from '92 then there is no point in worrying about this. People who care about new stuff already use newer hardware, or will get new hardware if they run into a problem. In fact, if you use stuff from '92 I wouldn't be surprised if you had lots of other problems too, like lack of drivers for modern OSes, incompatibility with current physical bus and interface connections, etc.
On the other hand, if the problem is in bad drivers (as Bill points out), this may be a different issue. I guess part of the problem is that for plain old IPv4 usage multicast features in NICs and the drivers don't get tested well, so you see problems when you switch to IPv6 or other things that depend on multicast capabilities. Is there any way to determine how widespread this problem is? Personally, I have never seen it. But YMMV.
--Jari
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