4 ms·

Do you have any conception of how much TCAM would be required to individually route 14 billion IP addresses? And even beyond that what else would be involved to

Do you have any conception of how much TCAM would be required to individually route 14 billion IP addresses? And even beyond that what else would be involved to route things fast enough at that granularity. A top end router today can handle ~million routes. You’re talking a four orders of magnitude increase.

netr0ute 4y ago
Who said the prefixes had to go to /32? Just to /28 would only need 16 million routes.
- lostapathy 4y ago
  Practical reasons of replacing "all the routers" aside ... would this even be desirable? Do we really want IP space carved up into smaller and smaller bites? Do we really want even more and smaller entities advertising routes into BGP? The big players have enough troubles with it - we don't need small businesses with a /28 playing in those waters.
  - toast0 4y ago
    Kind of / maybe. At my last job, we wanted to host our own anycast nameservers. You get the best results from having four nameservers in DNS, and you want them independent, so there's four /24s out there doing not much other than DNS (I think there may be some other stuff now). On the other hand, some other changes meant our thousands of servers no longer had their own ipv4 addresses, so there's several /24s returned to the hosting provider to be used by others. There's a lot of value in owning your user-facing IPs and being able to move them around as needed, but a lot of services don't really have that many user facing IPs, so utilization is low if they get a /24 per location.
    - lostapathy 4y ago
      I tend to think the amount of companies who want to do that AND could do it well is vanishingly low. On the converse - I think of all the smaller businesses I worked around that really wanted to get their own portable IP block and ASN because they thought it made them serious ... but just had no business playing in that space.
- ikiris 4y ago
  I'm sure if you start a fund to pay those operators to care, they'll get right on it. The current case is the people who need much more granular space are different than the people who'd bear the cost of it. Otherwise, just move to IPv6 or something and fix the problem in a saner way.
lillecarl 4y ago
I'm Linux there's a thing called route cache, which is really fast. Because in reality, even if you're a router at an IX you won't see traffic to all billions of ips. So if an ip isn't in the cache it'll go through a slow path instead and get cached. Why this wouldn't be possible in hardware is beyond me. Routing on commodity hardware is becoming a thing too with DPDK and OVS, you can now do 200gbps on a single x86 box.

netr0ute 4y ago

Who said the prefixes had to go to /32? Just to /28 would only need 16 million routes.

lostapathy 4y ago
Practical reasons of replacing "all the routers" aside ... would this even be desirable? Do we really want IP space carved up into smaller and smaller bites? Do we really want even more and smaller entities advertising routes into BGP? The big players have enough troubles with it - we don't need small businesses with a /28 playing in those waters.
- toast0 4y ago
  Kind of / maybe. At my last job, we wanted to host our own anycast nameservers. You get the best results from having four nameservers in DNS, and you want them independent, so there's four /24s out there doing not much other than DNS (I think there may be some other stuff now). On the other hand, some other changes meant our thousands of servers no longer had their own ipv4 addresses, so there's several /24s returned to the hosting provider to be used by others. There's a lot of value in owning your user-facing IPs and being able to move them around as needed, but a lot of services don't really have that many user facing IPs, so utilization is low if they get a /24 per location.
  - lostapathy 4y ago
    I tend to think the amount of companies who want to do that AND could do it well is vanishingly low. On the converse - I think of all the smaller businesses I worked around that really wanted to get their own portable IP block and ASN because they thought it made them serious ... but just had no business playing in that space.
ikiris 4y ago
I'm sure if you start a fund to pay those operators to care, they'll get right on it. The current case is the people who need much more granular space are different than the people who'd bear the cost of it. Otherwise, just move to IPv6 or something and fix the problem in a saner way.

lillecarl 4y ago

I'm Linux there's a thing called route cache, which is really fast. Because in reality, even if you're a router at an IX you won't see traffic to all billions of ips. So if an ip isn't in the cache it'll go through a slow path instead and get cached. Why this wouldn't be possible in hardware is beyond me. Routing on commodity hardware is becoming a thing too with DPDK and OVS, you can now do 200gbps on a single x86 box.