Re: What's 16 bits between friends?

[Iljitsch van Beijnum <[e-mail]>]

On 18-sep-2007, at 9:00, [e-mail] wrote:

>> If your point is that 64 bits exceeds 48 bits, yes, but 48 bits
>> doesn't meet the felt need. If it's not, then where are you going
>> with the question?

> Yes, that was where I was going, by way of the selection of EUI-64  
> as II.

> In its current incarnation (which seems to be unchanging), EUI-64 is
> essentially MAC-48 with an extra 16 bits in the middle, which are  
> fixed
> in value to "FFFE" (base 16).

If adding 16 extra bits makes sure that discussions about address  
conservation don't need to happen, it's bits well spent.

But apparently it didn't work, because now we have discussions about  
too many bits...

I suggest that there are only two reasonable approaches:

1. keep things the way they are now
2. move to variable length addresses

I'm assuming that we'll be doing 1. for quite some time and move to  
2. afterwards. But any efforts to redistribute bits within the 128  
that we have today or to change to a different fixed length just use  
up time, effort and money for no benefit whatsoever.


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