[mpls] Re: [EXTERNAL] Working group revision control - draft-ietf-

[Alexander Vainshtein <[e-mail]>]

Tony,

Lots of thanks for your input.



Regarding "mistakes were made" and Informational RFC 3429<https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3429.html>: I have checked, and, to the best of my understanding, there was no mistake:

  *   RFC 4329 has been published in November 2002
  *   At that time the allocation policy for special purpose labels has been defined in Section 6 of RFC 3032<https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3032.html> as “IETF Consensus” (renamed to “IETF Review” in Section 4.8 of RFC 8129<https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8126#section-4.8>) i.e., any IESG-approved RFC was good enough
  *   The label allocation policy for bSPL has been changed to “Standards Action” only June 2014 when RFC 7274<https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7274.html> has been published.
  *   The same RFC 7274 has introduced Extended Special Purpose labels (eSPL) and defined the Standards Action allocation policy for these.





I fully understand the rationale for the Standards Action allocation policy for bSPL: they are a scarce resource, and 8 out of 16 values are already allocated.



But the label space for eSPL is huge!  As of this moment (almost 11 years after eSPL have been introduced), this space is used as following:

  1.  Two blocks of 16 values each have been excluded from allocation in RFC 7274:
     *   Values 0-15 are excluded from allocation to prevent misinterpretation as bSPL
     *   Values 240-255 are also excluded from allocation as reserved for experimental use (lots of thanks to
  2.  Labels 16, 17 and 18 have been allocated. Last allocation has happened August 2024.



I.e., in 10 years following their introduction, only 3 out of more than 1,000,000 eSPL have been allocated. IMHO and FWIW the chances for exhausting this space are slim😊.



Maybe it is time to relax the allocation policy for at least some part of the eSPL space?



My 2c,

Sasha



-----Original Message-----
From: Tony Li <[e-mail]> On Behalf Of Tony Li
Sent: Tuesday, January 28, 2025 8:52 PM
To: Alexander Vainshtein <[e-mail]>
Cc: James Guichard <[e-mail]>; Tarek Saad <[e-mail]>; Joel M. Halpern <[e-mail]>; Loa Andersson <[e-mail]>; mpls <[e-mail]>; mpls-chairs <[e-mail]>; [e-mail]
Subject: Re: [EXTERNAL] [mpls] Working group revision control - draft-ietf-



[WG chair hat: on]



Hi Sasha,





> I have checked the IANA registry for bSPL and it says that label 14 is allocated as per RFC 4329 - which is an Informational RFC!





Interesting. I guess that mistakes were made…





> Does that mean that Informational RFC is ( or, at least, was) good enough to allocate a bSPL? If yes, can this precedent be used in this case?







Not according to my understanding.  Please see RFC 8126, section 4.9:



              For the Standards Action policy, values are assigned only through

              Standards Track or Best Current Practice RFCs in the IETF Stream.



> And, BTW, IANA says that eSPL allocation also requires Standards Action…





Excellent point.  So ISD is just kinda stuck.



T

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