Subject: Re: Another proposal to think about

>> Your proposal to handle MTU discovery at the TCP level sounds
>> reasonable, except that it only works for TCP.  That means we would
>> have to make similar changes to any other "packetization" protocols,
>> such as TP4 or VMTP or NFS, in order for them also to take advantage
>> of MTU discovery.  
>
>Excuse me, but something is obviously wrong in someone's thinking
>here (possibly mine):  Why would one *want* to change the packet
>size of an VMTP or UDP packet?  They are record-oriented protocols
>and must preserve such boundaries.
>
>-Philip


  I think its a philosophical reason. If you use the SMDS approach, each record
  or NFS 8K packet will be sent out as a number of mtu packets + last packet,
  with a common id of some sort and the layer above IP incurs the cost of 
  fragmentation as opposed to having IP incur the cost. 

  You do bring up a good point: Which packetization protocols are we really
  trying to help/solve with the mtu discovery? 

  rich