IPv6 "bloat"

Michael Thomas mike at mtcc.com
Sat Mar 19 22:29:43 UTC 2022


So out of the current discussions a lot of people have claimed that ipv6 
is bloated or suffers from second system syndrome, etc. So I decided to 
look at a linux kernel (HEAD I assume) and look at the differences 
between the v6 and v4 directories. I just crudely did a line count as a 
quick measure:

ipv6: 68k lines

ipv4: 97k lines

ipv4 looks to have the tcp and udp implementations (35k) so backing that 
out it is about 62k lines. That's pretty comparable. Linux has full 
routing capability so the kernel implements it for both.

So I'm just not getting where this "bloat" is. 10% growth for a second 
system syndrome seems almost miraculously good, imo.

What am i missing? This is in complete agreement with my intuition 30 
years ago that it was no big deal, at least from a software standpoint.

Mike



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