IPv6 "bloat"

Matt Hoppes mattlists at rivervalleyinternet.net
Sat Mar 19 22:47:59 UTC 2022


It has "features" which are at a minimum problematic and at a maximum 
show stoppers for network operators.

IPv6 seems like it was designed to be a private network communication 
stack, and how an ISP would use and distribute it was a second though.

On 3/19/22 5:29 PM, Michael Thomas wrote:
> 
> 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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