[bess] Adam Roach's No Objection on draft-ietf-bess-evpn-df-election-framework-07: (with COMMENT)

[Adam Roach <[e-mail]>]

Adam Roach has entered the following ballot position for
draft-ietf-bess-evpn-df-election-framework-07: No Objection

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COMMENT:
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I have one minor comment that the authors may wish to consider.

§1.2.1:

>  It is well-known that for good
>  hash distribution using the modulus operation, the modulus N should
>  be a prime-number not too close to a power of 2 [CLRS2009].

I suppose this refers to the explanation in [CLRS2009] §11.3.1. The
description there is pretty hand-wavy and not completely accurate except under
certain (admittedly common) conditions -- in which this case is not included.
You may wish to consider instead citing "The Art of Computer Programming (Vol.
3)" by Knuth, as it captures a lot more of the nuance behind why this rule of
thumb is frequently true, and covers the general case. There is probably a set
of considerations to take into account for Ethernet Tags with an even
distribution, but only because you have a relatively small set of potential
inputs -- not for any of the reasons cited in [CLRS2009]. Quoting Knuth:

  In general, we want to avoid values of M that divide r^k+a or r^k−a, where k
  and a are small numbers and r is the radix of the alphabetic character set
  (usually r=64, 256 or 100), since a remainder modulo such a value of M tends
  to be largely a simple superposition of key digits. Such considerations
  suggest that we choose M to be a prime number such that r^k!=a(modulo)M or
  r^k!=−a(modulo)M for small k & a.

I see that Benjamin has made a related comment. I share his objection to
the way point #2 is phrased, and think it needs to be reworded to properly
capture the subtleties implied by the preceding passage.