Re: [Cbor] 🔔 WGLC on draft-ietf-cbor-array-tags-03

[Jim Schaad <[e-mail]>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: CBOR <[e-mail]> On Behalf Of Laurence Lundblade
> Sent: Friday, March 8, 2019 7:44 AM
> To: Francesca Palombini <[e-mail]>
> Cc: [e-mail]; [e-mail]
> Subject: Re: [Cbor] 🔔 WGLC on draft-ietf-cbor-array-tags-03
> 
> In addition to what I said before, a deterministic encoding should be
> specified (formerly known as canonical) in the specification and that should
> probably be network / big endian.

I don't know that I agree with this.  Most of the machines that I am working with today are little endian machines, from that point of view if such a thing is done then little endian makes more sense.  However the fact that these are different tags implies that there is no need to have a deterministic encoding for this.  The encoding is going to be deterministic based on which endianness is chosen and that is machine or program specific.  I would expect that many implementations would not bother with the big endian encode and might not do the decode as they would be very rarely found.

> 
> To go on a bit more about detailed implementation...
> 
> In a native implementation there is also memory access alignment issue on
> the decode side, but not the encode side. Memory alignment is an issue on
> some Arm CPUs, though not on Intel CPUs as far as I know. So on some Arm
> CPUs, it won’t be possible to just return pointers to the bytes that came off
> the wire. Because non-string and non-aggregate CBOR data items can be 1, 2,
> 3, 5 and 9 bytes long, there can be no guarantee of alignment of the incoming
> encoded CBOR bytes.
> A portable decoder implementation will have to allocate aligned memory for
> the array and copy it. The decoder can byte-swap while it is copying so it lines
> up OK with the decoder having to do most of the work to achieve interop.

I am confused here about what you are saying here.  I think you mean that returning a pointer to data block in the encoded structure may be a problem if it is not aligned, but if that is what you are saying I really don't understand that from the above text.

Jim

> 
> There’s no alignment issue on the encode side.
> 
> The only other thing I’ve encountered in CBOR that needs copying of data is
> indefinite length strings.

That depends on the internal structure of binary data as well.  It may also need to be copied to get correct alignment.


> 
> LL
> 
> 
> 
> > On Mar 7, 2019, at 7:15 PM, Laurence Lundblade <[e-mail]>
> wrote:
> >
> > Comments in my usual vein…
> >
> > Because of the big/little endian option, it seems like this needs a discussion
> about design protocols with it, about preferred encoding / decoding and
> about interop.
> >
> > Probably it should say decoders should support both big and little and the
> encoder can do what is natural. It seems like there might be an option for
> both sides to support only one endianness, which will likely often be little
> endian because it is common.
> >
> > LL
> >
> >
> >> On Mar 6, 2019, at 4:53 AM, Francesca Palombini
> <[e-mail]> wrote:
> >>
> >> CBOR WG,
> >>
> >> The chairs believe the array-tags document is ready for WGLC:
> >> https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-cbor-array-tags-03
> >>
> >> The WGLC will end by *20th of March*, please make sure to send your
> comments to the list before then.
> >>
> >> Best regards,
> >> Francesca & Barry
> >>
> >> On 05/03/2019, 23:58, "CBOR on behalf of Carsten Bormann" <cbor-
> [e-mail] on behalf of [e-mail]> wrote:
> >>
> >>   -03 reflects the fact that IANA has made the allocations.
> >>
> >>   From this author’s point of view, we are ready for WGLC.
> >>
> >>   Grüße, Carsten
> >>
> >>
> >>> On Mar 5, 2019, at 23:55, [e-mail] wrote:
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts
> directories.
> >>> This draft is a work item of the Concise Binary Object Representation
> Maintenance and Extensions WG of the IETF.
> >>>
> >>>      Title           : Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR) Tags for
> Typed Arrays
> >>>      Authors         : Johnathan Roatch
> >>>                        Carsten Bormann
> >>> 	Filename        : draft-ietf-cbor-array-tags-03.txt
> >>> 	Pages           : 14
> >>> 	Date            : 2019-03-05
> >>>
> >>> Abstract:
> >>> The Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR, RFC 7049) is a data
> >>> format whose design goals include the possibility of extremely small
> >>> code size, fairly small message size, and extensibility without the
> >>> need for version negotiation.
> >>>
> >>> The present document makes use of this extensibility to define a
> >>> number of CBOR tags for typed arrays of numeric data, as well as two
> >>> additional tags for multi-dimensional and homogeneous arrays.  It is
> >>> intended as the reference document for the IANA registration of the
> >>> CBOR tags defined.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> The IETF datatracker status page for this draft is:
> >>> https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-cbor-array-tags/
> >>>
> >>> There are also htmlized versions available at:
> >>> https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-cbor-array-tags-03
> >>> https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-cbor-array-tags-03
> >>>
> >>> A diff from the previous version is available at:
> >>> https://www.ietf.org/rfcdiff?url2=draft-ietf-cbor-array-tags-03
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> Please note that it may take a couple of minutes from the time of
> >>> submission until the htmlized version and diff are available at
> tools.ietf.org.
> >>>
> >>> Internet-Drafts are also available by anonymous FTP at:
> >>> ftp://ftp.ietf.org/internet-drafts/
> >>>
> >>> _______________________________________________
> >>> I-D-Announce mailing list
> >>> [e-mail]
> >>> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/i-d-announce
> >>> Internet-Draft directories: http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html or
> >>> ftp://ftp.ietf.org/ietf/1shadow-sites.txt
> >>>
> >>
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