IPv6 "bloat" history

Fri Mar 25 15:33:59 UTC 2022

On 3/23/22 2:25 AM, Masataka Ohta wrote:
> William Allen Simpson wrote:

>> Neighbor Discovery is/was agnostic to NBMA.  Putting all the old
>> ARP and DHCP and other cruft into the IP-layer was my goal, so
>> that it would be forever link agnostic.
> 
> To make "IP uber alles", link-dependent adaptation mechanisms
> between IP and links are necessary. So, "ND uber alles" is a
> wrong goal.
> 

Meant to reply to this separately.

I've implemented on the order of 35+ protocols, most of them
predating IP.

My first IP implementation was 1979 for the Perkin-Elmer 7/16.
The link layer was X.25 to talk to Merit and over Telenet
(not telnet -- Telenet was a provider in those days).

John Gilmore recently gave a good history of the ARP origin.

Note that for PPP, we also had to negotiate a link layer shim.

Some folks then grabbed that effort, instead of building their
own, resulting in such monstrosities as PPP over Ethernet.

After so many times reinventing the wheel, IP uber alles is a
better goal.  Speaking as somebody familiar with the effort.