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I'm a big IP v6 fan but the multicast improvements are oft overstated. The meat and potatoes changes are about getting rid of broadcasts in a LAN (in a way wher
by zamadatix 2y ago
I'm a big IP v6 fan but the multicast improvements are oft overstated. The meat and potatoes changes are about getting rid of broadcasts in a LAN (in a way where a dumb switch will still treat them as broadcast anyways), not about actual routing of multicast between LANs. There is no requirement IPv6 routers must support routing multicast outside of the LAN (a completely different task). There is no public assignment of ff00::/8, it's still a free for all for generic streams. There's nothing that makes routing it across LANs easier to scale and orchestrate (in fact the protocols for this are separate from IP anyways).
Effectively, the only real "improvement" for the routed multicast case is you have more private multicast addresses to pick from.
- elcritch 2y agoYeah, it’s unfortunate multicast outside your own LAN isn’t more well supported. It makes sense as it’d require more orchestration above IP. Though I’d argue that 112 bits of random addresses makes the need for global registration largely unnecessary. Similarly to the rest of IPv6, the address is intentionally so large that it allows random IP generation with very low collision probability.
- zamadatix 2y agoGlobal registration is more about "a way to orchestrate who's allowed to send data to the ff00::1234 group" than "I hope we don't accidentally overlap!". It's the same reason we assign IPv6 unicast space to entities even though random generation could work almost all of the time.