[Isis-wg] Proposed Liaison response on Ethernet Jumbo Frames

[Alia Atlas <[e-mail]>]

Hi,

At the end of the ISIS WG meeting at IETF 98, I called attention to the
recent liaison from IEEE -  https://datatracker.ietf.org/liaison/1509/
<https://datatracker.ietf.org/liaison/1509/>.  There was significant
concern expressed about the decision to use a new EtherType instead of
EtherType 88-70, which is widely deployed.

Here is a proposed liaison response, which should also update you on
progress that has been made in this area. I would prefer to get this
liaison, with any improvements, agreed to by June 15.

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Colleagues,

Thank you very much for your liaison on March 25.  We are happy to learn
that IEEE now has a standard, IEEE Std 802.1AC-2016, for encoding LLC
frames and that its use appears to be exactly as described in
draft-ietf-isis-ext-eth-01.  There are a large number of pre-standard
implementations and deployments of this functionality.

With informal discussion, we were able to determine the current owner of
EtherType 88-70 and have what we believe is the necessary statement so that
this EtherType is now available for this functionality.  I would like to
thank both Yaakov Stein, CTO RAD, for making this happen and David Aviv,
CTO Radware.  As these types of challenges come up and have large impact,
we would prefer to learn of them earlier so that we can try and assist
sooner in the process.

We are quite concerned about the allocation of a new EtherType given the
extremely large deployment of this pre-standard common feature.  We would
encourage the IEEE 802.1 Working Group to strongly consider updating IEEE
Std 802.1AC to use the deployed EtherType 88-70 that is now available for
this purpose.

The ISIS Working Group will discuss whether there is additional work to do
now that IEEE Std 802.1AC-2016 is available.

Warmest regards,
Alia Atlas, IETF Routing Area Director
Chris Hopps, ISIS Working Group Chair
Hannes Gredler, ISIS Working Group Chair

=========

Please also discuss whether there is additional ISIS work to be done.  I'm
specifically thinking about sending hello packets at the MTU.

Regards,
Alia