The Choice: IPv4 Exhaustion or Transition to IPv6

Thu Jun 28 20:08:52 UTC 2007

> 
> IPv6 isn't what I wanted it to be (and I was on the IPng directorate).
> That said, it's what we have, and I think we *really* need something
> with a lot more address space.
> 

At a very low, hardware centric level, IPv6 would be a lot easier to
implement if

1) The addresses were 64 bits instead of 128 bits.
2) The extension headers architecture was completely revamped to be more
hardware friendly. 

I hear a lot of noise about wanting to do 40GE/100GE with L2/L3 switching,
but it is difficult to extremely difficult to implement hardware that can
accommodate all the flexibility of v6 and keep up.

IPv6 is a software architect's dream and a hardware architect's nightmare
;-)

Bora