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I don't get why people keep advocating for IPv6, when it has all the adoption of the Dart Programming Language. It's obviously not working for a majority of bus

I don't get why people keep advocating for IPv6, when it has all the adoption of the Dart Programming Language. It's obviously not working for a majority of businesses, or they would have adopted it. We just need to create an IPv7, which is just IPv4 with 64 bits of address space. I don't get why this is such a hard concept for people to swallow. IPv4 works fine, we're comfortable with it, we like it, let's just make it bigger. We can even make the new system backwards compatible. 0.0.0.0.127.0.0.1 is still localhost, for example. "But that's so hacky", you say. "We need to fix the old standard." This is what Intel said with its Intel 64 Itanium processor. Break with the old instruction set and make it better. AMD came out with Opteron[1], a hacky extension of the x86 ISA but for 64 bit. Backwards compatible. Swept the market. It's why your binaries are compiled to "amd64" now. Yes, IPv4 has quirks, and those quirks are well understood and lots of code exists now to deal with them. Let's not find out all the quirks of a new system the hard way for seemingly little benefit. 1: https://www.eweek.com/pc-hardware/64-bit-intel-vs.-amd https://www.eweek.com/pc-hardware/64-bit-intel-vs.-amd

M2Ys4U 6y ago
>I don't get why people keep advocating for IPv6, when it has all the adoption of the Dart Programming Language. I'm sure Dart would be absolutely over the moon to have 33% adoption.[0] [0] https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
mprovost 6y ago
Totally agree. Most people seem to assume that v6 is inevitable just because it's a standard. But its adoption is so low and has taken so many years that it's entirely possible that it will just become irrelevant and an evolutionary dead end. The history of tech is littered with abandoned standards that were replaced with something better. Ethernet was supposed to be replaced with ATM...
mnd999 6y ago
Not a good idea. It’s still a new protocol so you still have to build support for it. You’d have to fix all the software again to understand ipv7 and you have to start again from zero adoption. And what you get is as you state worse than ipv6 which is already widely adopted.
- djhaskin987 6y ago
  Ah, but you could do things like put logic in routers like this: "I see you're giving me a 32 bit address. I'm just gonna interpret that as a 64 address padded left with zeroes." Now router firmware, network stacks, kernel modules -- It's not a full rewrite, just an extension. Now all the bugfixes and workarounds we've written over 50 years still apply. If it were made truly backwards compatible, you'd instantly have tons of adoption because anyone that runs IPv4 is supported and works without any changes. That's way more adoption than IPv6. You wouldn't instantly have to fix all the software again. It would work with old software. This is why hacks like UTF-8 exists. Old systems that understand only ASCII still work fine and communicate well with the systems that deal in UTF-8.
  - Dagger2 6y ago
    You haven't given that anywhere near enough thought. You can't just slap some zeros onto the start of a v4 address and come up with a bigger address space that somehow works with v4 networking code. The problem isn't backwards compatibility, it's forwards compatibility: v4 isn't forwards compatible with larger address spaces, so it's not possible to do what you're suggesting. There are various ways of making a bigger address space with backwards compatibility to v4 though -- and all of the ways which are actually possible and work are already implemented by v6.
  - CountSessine 6y ago
    It's not a full rewrite, just an extension The majority of packets on the internet pass through fairly hard-coded switching chips that probably couldn't be updated to handle this. They can handle IPv6, though. If it were made truly backwards compatible It can't be made backward compatible. Every switch on the internet needs to understand your new extended address scheme otherwise they'll send your packets to a dead-zone somewhere in Uzbekistan. Backward compatibility was never an option. As soon as you add new bits to the address, old routers won't send them to the right place.
bluGill 6y ago
How would you make your ipv7 get adopted? It still won't be IPv4 compatible so why would anyone move? I can't come up with any reason that doesn't also apply to ipv6.
Olipro 6y ago
This makes no sense at all. The notation can basically be anything you want - you could, if you wanted, invent a new notation for IPv4 or IPv6 right now. What actually matters is the packet format. You cannot make it backwards compatible because it is impossible to expand the IP header's address space without it becoming unparseable to existing network equipment. "Ah" you say, "but we could put the extra bits after the end of what is basically an IPv4 packet" Well no, you can't do that either because it would require executing a global seizure of existing IPv4 space and reorganising the entirety of the IPv4 internet into a hierarchical manner where your "IPv7" extra bits can be processed prior to the final destination. IPv6 works fine and is well-designed. Hardware and software implementations have been in-production for decades now; Google alone see 30% of their total traffic over v6. Fundamentally, support of any network protocol is subject to Internet participants having compatible kit; x86-64 wasn't immune to this; if you didn't buy the chips, you couldn't use the software. The reason it actually won is that the Itanium architecture was completely different and resorted to translating x86 instructions which, unsurprisingly, ran like treacle and never made it to the consumer market either. The idea of inventing yet another internet protocol is patently absurd when you consider it would require yet more upgrades across the globe to hardware and software in order to support it.
- mprovost 6y ago
  The idea that there are already devices out there designed for a new protocol was considered an advantage of the TUBA protocol to replace IPv4 before v6 was chosen: "The reviewers generally felt that the most important thing that TUBA has offers is that it is based on CLNP and there is significant deployment of CLNP-capable routers throughout the Internet." [0] [0] https://www.potaroo.net/ietf/idref/draft-ipng-recommendation/#page-17 https://www.potaroo.net/ietf/idref/draft-ipng-recommendation... Of course these days nobody remembers either TUBA or CNLP...

M2Ys4U 6y ago

>I don't get why people keep advocating for IPv6, when it has all the adoption of the Dart Programming Language. I'm sure Dart would be absolutely over the moon to have 33% adoption.[0] [0] https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html

mprovost 6y ago

Totally agree. Most people seem to assume that v6 is inevitable just because it's a standard. But its adoption is so low and has taken so many years that it's entirely possible that it will just become irrelevant and an evolutionary dead end. The history of tech is littered with abandoned standards that were replaced with something better. Ethernet was supposed to be replaced with ATM...

mnd999 6y ago

Not a good idea. It’s still a new protocol so you still have to build support for it. You’d have to fix all the software again to understand ipv7 and you have to start again from zero adoption. And what you get is as you state worse than ipv6 which is already widely adopted.

djhaskin987 6y ago
Ah, but you could do things like put logic in routers like this: "I see you're giving me a 32 bit address. I'm just gonna interpret that as a 64 address padded left with zeroes." Now router firmware, network stacks, kernel modules -- It's not a full rewrite, just an extension. Now all the bugfixes and workarounds we've written over 50 years still apply. If it were made truly backwards compatible, you'd instantly have tons of adoption because anyone that runs IPv4 is supported and works without any changes. That's way more adoption than IPv6. You wouldn't instantly have to fix all the software again. It would work with old software. This is why hacks like UTF-8 exists. Old systems that understand only ASCII still work fine and communicate well with the systems that deal in UTF-8.
- Dagger2 6y ago
  You haven't given that anywhere near enough thought. You can't just slap some zeros onto the start of a v4 address and come up with a bigger address space that somehow works with v4 networking code. The problem isn't backwards compatibility, it's forwards compatibility: v4 isn't forwards compatible with larger address spaces, so it's not possible to do what you're suggesting. There are various ways of making a bigger address space with backwards compatibility to v4 though -- and all of the ways which are actually possible and work are already implemented by v6.
- CountSessine 6y ago
  It's not a full rewrite, just an extension The majority of packets on the internet pass through fairly hard-coded switching chips that probably couldn't be updated to handle this. They can handle IPv6, though. If it were made truly backwards compatible It can't be made backward compatible. Every switch on the internet needs to understand your new extended address scheme otherwise they'll send your packets to a dead-zone somewhere in Uzbekistan. Backward compatibility was never an option. As soon as you add new bits to the address, old routers won't send them to the right place.

bluGill 6y ago

How would you make your ipv7 get adopted? It still won't be IPv4 compatible so why would anyone move? I can't come up with any reason that doesn't also apply to ipv6.

Olipro 6y ago

This makes no sense at all. The notation can basically be anything you want - you could, if you wanted, invent a new notation for IPv4 or IPv6 right now. What actually matters is the packet format. You cannot make it backwards compatible because it is impossible to expand the IP header's address space without it becoming unparseable to existing network equipment. "Ah" you say, "but we could put the extra bits after the end of what is basically an IPv4 packet" Well no, you can't do that either because it would require executing a global seizure of existing IPv4 space and reorganising the entirety of the IPv4 internet into a hierarchical manner where your "IPv7" extra bits can be processed prior to the final destination. IPv6 works fine and is well-designed. Hardware and software implementations have been in-production for decades now; Google alone see 30% of their total traffic over v6. Fundamentally, support of any network protocol is subject to Internet participants having compatible kit; x86-64 wasn't immune to this; if you didn't buy the chips, you couldn't use the software. The reason it actually won is that the Itanium architecture was completely different and resorted to translating x86 instructions which, unsurprisingly, ran like treacle and never made it to the consumer market either. The idea of inventing yet another internet protocol is patently absurd when you consider it would require yet more upgrades across the globe to hardware and software in order to support it.

mprovost 6y ago
The idea that there are already devices out there designed for a new protocol was considered an advantage of the TUBA protocol to replace IPv4 before v6 was chosen: "The reviewers generally felt that the most important thing that TUBA has offers is that it is based on CLNP and there is significant deployment of CLNP-capable routers throughout the Internet." [0] [0] https://www.potaroo.net/ietf/idref/draft-ipng-recommendation/#page-17 https://www.potaroo.net/ietf/idref/draft-ipng-recommendation... Of course these days nobody remembers either TUBA or CNLP...