"Mike O'Dell" <mo(_at_)ccr(_dot_)org> writes:
anyone imagining that ipv6 will get an observable percentage
of total endpoint penetration any time soon only needs to look
at the onslaught of microcontrollers starting to ship with
IPv4 technology integral to them.
Now that I'm in the embedded operating system business, allow me to
mention that IPv6 has started showing up as a customer demand
item. And no, I didn't induce that. (We ship with v6 of course, but
the fact that people have asked us about v6 independently has been an
interesting surprise.)
also note that a number of chip makers are doing "hardware"
implementations of ipv4 stacks, up to and through transport
level crypto.
Not quite. Chips like the various IBM 4xx series CPUs with
pico-processor mixins and and the Intel IXP1200 and such have
significant amounts of stack processing built in, but it isn't really
hardwired to v4. These "picoprocessors" aren't very smart, but they
aren't quite "v4 hardcoded" either.
I've seen tell of other units that have v4 hardwired in for purposes
like the ones you mention (i.e. smart toasters) but mostly what one
finds is that there are units with v4 microcode -- it isn't really in
the metal.
ipv6 may eventually be visible, but i predict most people
currently reading this will have grandchildren using ipv4
technology, whether they want to or not.
Entirely possible. However, there will probably be people still using
X.25 in 20 years. The question is, though, how many.
I would by no means refer to the current number of v6 users as
significant from a global market perspective. It isn't. The number of
v6 users currently is many orders of magnitude smaller than the v4
world. However, nothing like this happens instantly, and the TREND is
pretty damn astonishing. I hadn't even sent a single v6 packet a
couple of years ago, and now many of my geek friends have v6 running
in their homes and offices, and I didn't give them help OR prompt
them. What's more, they've actually got a use for v6 for things like
NAT penetration. They can ssh to a specific machine in their home
network even though the cable modem only has one v4 address to give
out. Now we're talking about a tiny number of systems experts here
who're either using open source OSes or were (before XP) patient
enough to install the MS Research stack, but it is very different from
the days a couple of years ago where even v6 hackers never used v6.
Hell, I roamed onto a university campus wireless network not that long
ago, and for the hell of it sent out a router discovery message and
found myself on the 6bone. No, not quite the same as finding my
dentist using v6, but an astonishing trend, even from the point of
view of my wildest dreams.
I think we're still going to be below "observable user threshold" for
a while to come even while this growth continues. How long? I'm
planning on doing some quantitative analysis for a talk I'm giving in
a few weeks. I'll try posting results when I have them. Off the cuff,
I don't expect anything to show up in network statistics for a year or
two, but I'll know better soon.
--
Perry E. Metzger perry(_at_)wasabisystems(_dot_)com
--
NetBSD Development, Support & CDs. http://www.wasabisystems.com/