IPv6 "bloat"

Sat Mar 19 22:50:25 UTC 2022

On 3/19/22 3:47 PM, Matt Hoppes wrote:
> 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.

What might those be? And it doesn't seem to be a show stopper for a lot 
of very large carriers.

Mike

>
> 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
>>