[ppml] IPv6 flawed?

[briand at ca.afilias.info]

Owen DeLong wrote:
> On Sep 2, 2007, at 1:21 PM, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
>>
>> IETF is still working... And it's not like adopting PI in the mean
>> time helps.
>>
> I strongly disagree.  Adopting PI in the mean time can serve as very
> useful input to express to IETF that they _MUST_ solve the routing
> problem in a scalable way.  And ID-Locator split is long overdue.

> We don't want small routing tables.  We want routing tables that fit
> in existing hardware and a churn-rate which can be handled by the
> hardware.  I don't think anyone actually cares if the routing table
> is 10,000, 150,000, or 230,000 routes.  Sure, they worry if it's
> 500,000 routes or more, but, wanting to avoid an excruciatingly
> large routing table is different from wanting a small one.

There are a number of considerations we need, as a community, to address:
- in the short-term, much/most of the DFZ will be dual-stack
- the DFZ routers will carry both IPv4 and IPv6
- collectively, the short-term needs of DFZ networks cannot be ignored
- this specifically includes hard limits on DFZ prefix counts
- breaking the hard limit will most likely result in IPv6 getting tossed
- IPv6 needs to not be tossed to avoid a "big crunch" around 2010

So, the short term need, to avoid a "tragedy of the commons" effect,
where short term is likely 3-5 years, is that O(IPv6 PI) == O(ASNs).
Meaning, we need to keep PI space down to about 1 per ASN.

And after 3-5 years, with widespread adoption, there may not be any
(compelling) reason to change that policy.

So, as long as you mean "routing table" to be "IPv4 + IPv6" routing table
aggregate, then yes, 10k vs 150k vs 250k is mostly unimportant.
Which translates into "very few IPv6 routes".

Brian Dickson