Routing IPv4 with OSPFv3

[Arthur Dimitrelis <[e-mail]>]

Greetings,

I'm interested in people's opinions and experiences in using OSPFv3 (aka
OSPF for IPv6) for routing IPv4.

My understanding from reading the OSPFv3 specification (RFC2740) is that
OSPFv3 is designed with a degree of protocol independence. By this I
mean that you could, in principle, use OSPFv3 to route any protocol
family you chose, just so long as you were able to map addressing
information to the topology (and of course your OSPF code knew how to
set up the correct forwarding state for your given protocol family). The
topology-to-address mapping for IPv6 is done using OSPFv3's
Intra-area-prefix-LSAs, but the spec makes no mention of how you might
map IPv4 addressing information to a network topology.

So, my questions are:
- Regarding OSPFv3 - is the bulk of it protocol agnostic, or is it just
my imagination? Was it the intention of the protocol authors to create a
protocol that could easily route multiple protocol families, or just
IPv6?
- Is there any interest out there in using OSPFv3 to route IPv4?
- Do people think it is a good idea in general to have a single protocol
route both v4 and v6? (I'm guessing that there are those out there who
think that OSPFv2 works just fine so why would you want to change it . .
. )

And while I'm at it, are there any such things as Opaque LSAs for
OSPFv3?

cheers,
Arthur