3 ms·
Actually, most of these "wishlist items" are not relevant for the core IPv6 protocol (as in subset that needs to be understood by routers) and deal mainly with
by dfox 16y ago
Actually, most of these "wishlist items" are not relevant for the core IPv6 protocol (as in subset that needs to be understood by routers) and deal mainly with end hosts. But what is relevant to cost of migration is exactly the larger address space, most high-performance routers do almost everything in custom hardware.
Most important part of this cost-wise are FIB lookups, with FIB being typically implemented as specialized content addressable memory chip, which due to it's nature is pretty expensive (it is one of things that you cannot reasonably implement in programmable logic) to redesign for larger address space (and impossible to upgrade without throwing out whole router). On the other hand, header decoding are usually implemented in some programmable logic or directly in software so, that can be field-upgraded with relative ease. So in the "Carrier grade" and "L3 switch" categories you get things that are new and capable of IPv6, things that simply cannot be upgraded and devices that can be upgraded to do IPv6 routing in software (at great performance overhead)
- jerf 16y agoRouters aren't the only cost source. I've seen some coworkers work on moving IPv4 end-user appliance products to IPv6, and just the act of managing IPv6 addresses on such appliances, to say nothing of interacting with the other IPv6 issues that may not be part of the "core protocol" but you better support if you're going to claim IPv6 compliance, was a surprising amount of work. I thought I knew what IPv6 was, but man was I ever wrong. It's significantly more complicated than IPv4. Which I don't necessarily even mean as a criticism, some of the bits of complication are actually fixing problems with IPv4, while I'd say other things are just wishlist items. But regardless of how right or wrong it is, it is definitely more complicated. As expensive as routers can be at the high end, broadly speaking, router costs in dealing with the core protocol do not seem to me to be what is holding back adoption. The costs are dominated by all of the other things that need to speak IPv6 before you can transition at all, let alone entirely eliminate IPv4. Maybe I'm wrong, though, it's hard to tell.
- dfox 16y agoI focused on costs to organizations deploying IPv6, not costs to manufacturers/developers (which may or may not be reflected in increased equipment prices). And as for all the other things that need to speak IPv6, I was actually surprised that for more than year any random new piece of network attached anything that I have seen supported IPv6 out of the box and just worked.