Waste will kill ipv6 too

Fri Dec 29 10:27:41 UTC 2017

> > My wild guess is if we'd just waited a little bit longer to formalize
> > IPng we'd've more seriously considered variable length addressing with
> > a byte indicating how many octets in the address even if only 2
> > lengths were immediately implemented (4 and 16.)
> 
> Actually, that got heaved over the side fairly early in the IPng discussion,
> because nobody  who was building silicon last century wanted to
> deal with arbitrary-length addresses.  The IPv4 header had source and
> destination addresses on 4-byte boundaries for good reasons which
> still held true when we did the IPv6 headers.

It's rather interesting how parsing of variable length addresses was
thought to be way too complicated - while parsing of IPv6 extension
header chains of unknown length was okay.

Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, sthaug at nethelp.no