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People will start overloading the numbers. I do hope we'll have stopped using IPv4 by then... But well, a decade after address exhaustion we are still on it, s
by marcosdumay 1y ago
People will start overloading the numbers.
I do hope we'll have stopped using IPv4 by then... But well, a decade after address exhaustion we are still on it, so who knows?
- kbolino 1y agoIPv6 uses the exact same 8-bit codes as IPv4. It uses them a little differently -- in IPv4, there is one protocol per packet, while in IPv6, "protocols" can be chained in a mechanism called extension headers -- but this actually makes the problem of number exhaustion more acute.
- brewmarche 1y agoWhat if extension headers made it better? We could come up with a protocol consisting solely of a larger Next Header field and chain this pseudo header with the actual payload whenever the protocol number is > 255. The same idea could also be used in IPv4.
- kbolino 1y agoI didn't mean to imply otherwise. But, as you say, this is equally applicable to IPv4 and IPv6. There were a lot of issues solved by IPv6, but "have even more room for non-TCP/UDP transports" wasn't one of them (and didn't need to be, tbqh).
- brewmarche 1y agoI agree, although I am a bit surprised to see that we’ve used more than half of the protocol numbers already