Re: on-link and off-link addresses, side discussion

[Philip Homburg <[e-mail]>]

> Further, the definition says that "a node considers an address to
> be on-link it is covered by a particular prefix".  That operation,
> 'being covered by', is not specified.
> 
> One might think of the use of a longest prefiix match algorithm.
> 
> A longest prefix match algorithm is defined in that RFC to be used
> to determine which prefix (from a set of prefixes) 'covers' an
> address.
> 
> On another hand, the definition of 'on-link' says it wants to
> identify whether a _particular_ prefix 'covers' an address (not to
> try to identify whether an address matches better one prefix or
> another).  That is a distinct algorithm from the longest prefix
> match algorithm.
> 
> To give an example: by using a longest-prefix-match algorithm in
> a normal way (identify which prefix out of a set of prefixes matches
> better one particular address) one will always 'cover' an address
> with almost any prefix.  All allocated prefixes start with this
> '000' triple bits.  So they all cover any address; but in that
> 'cover' operation one specifically adds that it covers up to 3
> bits.  The 'cover' operation is successful, but just up to 3.

I'm confused about what you are trying to say. The way I understand it is
as follows:
An RA may contain a prefix that has the onlink bit set. The interface
is implicitly defined as the interface over which the RA arrives at the
host, so there is no need to make this explicit. Information in an RA only
applies to the interface over which the RA arrives.

Then 'covered by the prefix'. Covered by the prefix 2001:db8::/80 means that
if the first 80 bits of an address are the same as the first 80 bits of the
prefix, then the address is said to be covered by the prefix. For onlink,
there is no 64-bit boundary. Any prefix length should work. The prefix
length determines how many bits are compared to decide on a match.

Then, in theory there could be overlapping prefixes, some might be onlink,
some might be not onlink. So in theory we could define a longest matching rule.
However, this leads to code complexity and there don't seem to be any
practical use cases for overlapping prefixes, so leaving this undefined
and assuming that routers do not generate RAs with overlapping prefixes
seems fine.