On Tue, 12 Nov 2002 01:07:57 EST, "J. Noel Chiappa" said:
Just how "fully worked" was IPv6 when the IETF picked it? Much of the
existing IPv6 protocol specs (e.g. the MIPv6 referred to above) weren't even
a gleam in someone's eye then, but apparently the extremely incomplete state
of IPv6 at that point was no bar to selecting it.
Well Noel, although *my* memories of NIMROD include a lot of things that in
hindsight should probably have been included into IPv6, I also recall that
it was far less well developed than the other contenders at the time.
RFC1992 has a *lot* of interesting ideas in it. Unfortunately, it was only
a routing architecture, and came out in August 1996, while RFC1883 through
1887 came out in December 1995, and included IP header formats, addressing
architectures, and ICMPv6 and DNS extensions as well.
I have to admit wondering what progress in ASIC design has happened over the
last 6-8 years, and whether the original objection to variable-length addresses
(that high-end routers needed fixed header lengths for efficiency) would still
apply today....
--
Valdis Kletnieks
Computer Systems Senior Engineer
Virginia Tech
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