Optimal IPv6 router

Mon Feb 6 14:48:29 UTC 2012

On Mon, Feb 6, 2012 at 1:04 PM, Daniel Roesen <dr at cluenet.de> wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 05, 2012 at 09:07:57PM -0500, Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu wrote:
>> OK, I'll bite.  What would qualify as a "native IPv6" router?
>
> Perhaps those which were designed with IPv4+IPv6 in mind from day 1,
> both in hardware and software - like Juniper/JUNOS. In contrast to other

Not just that.

I had meant that the HW is optimized for IPv6 and also as a side
effect does IPv4. This router could be designed assuming that you'll
have more IPv6 traffic to forward than IPv4.

> the gear where IPv6 was always an aftermath, which shows in both
> hardware (limits of performance, functionality and scaling) as well as
> software (every feature gets implemented twice, even if the feature
> itself is completely AFI-agnostic - see e.g. IOS/IOS-XE [can't comment
> on XR]).

Yes, thats what i had in mind.

One example that comes to my mind is that a few existing routers cant
do line rate routing for IPv6 traffic as long as the netmask is < 65.
Also routers have a limited TCAM size for storing routes with masks >
64. These routers were primarily designed for IPv4 and also support
IPv6.

I was wondering what we could optimize on if we only design an IPv6
router (assume an extreme case where it does not even support IPv4).

Glen
>
> Best regards,
> Daniel
>
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