Thoughts on increasing MTUs on the internet

Thu Apr 12 14:12:43 UTC 2007

* Steven M. Bellovin:

> A few years ago, the IETF was considering various jumbogram options.
> As best I recall, that was the official response from the relevant
> IEEE folks: "no". They're concerned with backward compatibility.  

Gigabit ethernet has already broken backwards compatibility and is
essentially point-to-point, so the old compatibility concerns no
longer apply.  Jumbo frame opt-in could even be controlled with a
protocol above layer 2.