Re: [mpls] [sfc] The first nibble issue associated with MPLS encapsulation

I concur with Loa - with a qualifier:
AFAIK there is no such thing as an "Early IANA De-allocation" process😉.
So we may still have to wait some time until these values become formally available for reuse.

My 2c.

Thumb typed on my cellphone
Regards,
Sasha

-------- Original Message --------
From: Loa Andersson <loa@pi.nu>
Date: Wed, April 13, 2016 3:16 PM +0300
To: mpls@ietf.org, "tom p." <daedulus@btconnect.com>
Subject: Re: [mpls] [sfc] The first nibble issue associated with MPLS encapsulation

Tom,

On 2016-04-13 19:53, t.petch wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Eric C Rosen" <erosen@juniper.net>
> Sent: Monday, April 11, 2016 3:19 PM
>
>
>> (Removed sfc from the cc-list, this seems out of scope for that WG.)
>>
>> In designing the BIER header, the BIER WG is free to mandate any value
>> it chooses in the first nibble.  These values do not come from a
> "first
>> nibble" registry.
>>
>> It seems prudent to put a value like 5 for the following reasons:
>>
>> - If a BIER packet is being parsed by an off-line tool, this is a good
>> hint (though just a hint) that the packet is actually a BIER packet;
>>
>> - If a BIER packet is traveling through an MPLS tunnel, and it
> traverses
>> a node that does its MPLS load splitting by guessing at the type of
> the
>> payload, then this is  a good hint that the MPLS payload is not IPv4,
>> IPv6, or PW.
>>
>> This strategy does incur a risk.  Suppose IPv5 gets designed,
>> implemented, and deployed, and folks start to deploy hardware that
> does
>
> Too late;  see
>
>
> https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-boucadair-ip-version-5-8-9-historic-00

Isn't this just in time - if IPv5 is made historic - we can safely use
it.

/Loa
>
> Discussion on the int-area list.
>
> Tom Petch
>
>
>
>> MPLS load balancing by inspecting the IPv5 headers of the MPLS
>> payloads.  If a BIER packet is traversing an MPLS tunnel,
> inappropriate
>> load splitting may occur if the hardware thinks the payload is IPv5
>> rather than BIER.
>>
>> This particular risk doesn't seem very significant to me.
>>
>> Thus I don't think there's anything here that needs fixing.
>>
>
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