Call for testers: RFC 5569 (6rd) support in stf(4)

[Bjoern A. Zeeb]

On Thu, 30 Sep 2010, Doug Barton wrote:

Hey,

> In any case I didn't say that 6rd was not useful at all. What I tried to make 
> the case for is that its utility is limited, both in the absolute sense and 
> in the temporal sense; and that because of these limitations the benefits 
> that adding the code bring are outweighed by the costs of maintaining it past 
> what will likely be its useful lifetime.

The maintainance costs are effectively pretty low, especially as it's coming
with stf; it's a single line in a kernel config and not many more files but
it will have great value to a lot of people the next years.


> My point about FreeBSD 9 is that if we add the 6rd code today, then release 
> 9.0 in about a year, then support the RELENG_9 branch for 4-6 years that we 
> will still be maintaining code that no one has any use for. Sorry if I wasn't 
> clear.

While I would like to live in that kind of world that by mid 10s all
the tunneling, transition, .. technologies would be gone, ideally
along with legacy IP, I guess you are massively underestimating this
from the early adopters point of view; while for some of us things
have happened and we are waiting for the world to catch up, for other
folks things might not start within the another product lifecycle.
I am sure we'll see a lot of different scenarios for quite some time.
I would expect that we'll still be shipping that code in at least 12.x.

Though completely taken out of context, Dave Ward's words the minute on
from there: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXMMBrWRnvc#t=49m54s
summarizes some things quite nicely.


> In contrast, the bit of my post that you snipped suggested that a better 
> course of action would be to focus on the areas of our v6 stack that will be 
> used for the lifetime of the protocol, like the performance penalty that 
> currently exists for the v6 loopback device.

I think that noone questions that this will need time as well and so
do another 15 things on the IPv6 side but maybe someone is already
working on it ..

/bz

-- 
Bjoern A. Zeeb                              Welcome a new stage of life.