Re: Comments on draft-bonica-spring-srv6-plus

On Thu., 4 Jul. 2019, 06:06 Tom Herbert, <tom@herbertland.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 3, 2019 at 12:44 PM Ron Bonica <rbonica@juniper.net> wrote:
> >
> > Hi Tom,
> >
> > Thanks for the review.
> >
> > On Friday, I will update draft-bonica-6man-comp-rtg-hdr. It will contain
> a section on mutability. It will say:
> >
> > - the Segments Left field is mutable
> > - every other field in the CRH is immutable
> >
> > I will also update draft-bonica-6man-vpn-dest-opt and
> draft-bonica-6man-seg-end-opt. Both of those request an IANA option type
> with the CHG bit equal to 0. So they are both immutable.
> >
> > SID encoding isn't entirely opportunistic. Since the last IETF, we
> realized that it would be burdensome for every vendor  to support all three
> SID lengths. So, we said that implementations MUST support 32-bit encoding
> and MAY support 16 bit encoding. (We dropped 8-bit encoding entirely).
>
> This sounds dicey from an interoperability and flexibility point of
> view. Supposed I've deployed a network where everyone is using 16 bits
> SIDs. But, then for some reason I need to switch vendors for a small
> part of the network and their implementation doesn't support 16 bits.
> Do I need to up the MSV and make all SIDs to be 32 bits just on the
> off chance that one of the new nodes might be in some SID list?
>
> >
> > A side effect of this decision is that a node should only send CRH's
> with 16-bit encoding every other node in the domain supports 16-bit
> encoding. So, network operators will need to configure the SID length on
> each node, with the default being 32.
>
> Well, in light the above problem, I have to wonder if it's better to
> only support 32 bits. The leap from 128 bits to 32 bits is much more
> consequential than going from 32 to 16 bits. Other than that, it
> simplifies the protocol, reduces support and test matrix, ensures
> interoperability, etc.
>

One single size is much better.

I think most people will pick the larger size, regardless of their
functional SID space need, to avoid the possibility of getting it wrong and
then having to do a lot of after hours and possibly service impacting work
in the future to expand from the smaller to larger size.

Implementations would also be simpler, so less opportunities for
implementation bugs.

It also means no possibility of configuration errors because the size is a
constant rather than a settable parameter.

A lot of the principles in RFC 5505 - "Principles of Internet Host
Configuration" - seem to me to be equally applicable to network interior
protocols.

For example, I think the whole of "2.1. Minimize Configuration" fully
applies here.

Regards,
Mark.

> Tom
>
> >
> >
>     Ron
> >
> >
> >
> > Juniper Business Use Only
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Tom Herbert <tom@herbertland.com>
> > Sent: Wednesday, July 3, 2019 2:48 PM
> > To: Ron Bonica <rbonica@juniper.net>
> > Cc: SPRING WG <spring@ietf.org>; 6man WG <ipv6@ietf.org>
> > Subject: Comments on draft-bonica-spring-srv6-plus
> >
> > Hi Ron,
> >
> > Thanks for the draft.
> >
> > I think the name SRV6+ might be a little misleading in that it could be
> misinterpreted as SRV6+ being a superset of SRV6. Specifically,
> > SRV6+ doesn't allow 128 bit SIDs which seems inherent in SRV6 and so
> > the primary function (and implementation) of SRV6 isn't compatible. It
> doesn't seem like it would be that much effort to allow a 128 bit SID size
> to be compatible.
> >
> > I don't understand the rationale for needing a MSV to be explictly
> configured throughout the domain. Couldn't the appropriate SID size be
> chosen by the sender at run time. For instance, if all the SIDs in a list
> are less than 65,536 then 16 bit SIDs can be used, else 32 bit SIDs are
> used (I assume 16 and 32 bit SIDs are in same number space).
> > Since CRH has the bits stating the SID length there is no ambiguity at
> the receiver. SID compression is opportunistic and it's always good
> practice to avoid situations that require wide scale renumbering.
> >
> > Please add a section on mutability requirements of protocol fields so
> that there is no ambiguity.
> >
> > Tom
>
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