Re: [Roll] WGLC for draft-thubert-6man-flow-label-for-rpl-03

Philip Levis <pal@cs.stanford.edu> Fri, 01 August 2014 16:50 UTC

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From: Philip Levis <pal@cs.stanford.edu>
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Subject: Re: [Roll] WGLC for draft-thubert-6man-flow-label-for-rpl-03
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On Aug 1, 2014, at 5:44 AM, Pascal Thubert (pthubert) <pthubert@cisco.com> wrote:

> 
> FYI, it will break nothing since there is no assumption in the Internet that the flow label will be carried unchanged. Consistently, there is no native way to secure the flow label to make sure it was not tempered with (IOW it is not protected by ULP checksums, IPSec AH or ESP transport mode). 
> 
> The last call at 6MAN is where I expect problems with the use of the flow label field in this draft to be pointed at. I'm happy to report that there was no trace of bigotry there, all the contrary. 6MAN will confirm whether this draft conforms the spirit of the existing RFCs and so far I gathered, from all but you, that it does

Pascal, I don't think this is a question of spirit or anything. I mean, I'll repeat, 6437 states

"A forwarding node MUST either leave a non-zero flow label value unchanged or change it only for compelling operational security reasons as described in Section 6.1."

If the point is that experience and use and the spirit of the flow label has changed from this MUST, then we should explicitly state so. I'm not arguing that the above prescription is right; but it's what's written. What worries me is the idea of directly contradicting the text of a prior RFC (the one explicitly on flow labels, no less), without correspondingly obsoleting that RFC. This isn't a SHOULD. It's a MUST!

I've always thought that using the flow label in this way within an LLN is a good idea. The problem is that you can't do so without violating a MUST in the RFC that specifies how flow labels are used. It sounds like the letter of that document doesn't match the spirit of it -- so let's fix the letter, so it says what was intended! Why is there such recalcitrance to do so? Or provide any quantitative basis for the claims of battery power? You've been proposing this for nearly 4 years now...

I personally see two reasonable ways forward:

1) (As Carsten mentioned) Update 6437 to embrace these new and valuable uses of the flow label.

2) Provide evidence that using the flow label in this way would provide significant enough gains that violating a MUST in the RFC specifying the flow label is worth it.

It seems like you're advocating a third:

3) Violate a MUST in the RFC specifying how the flow label is used without any evidence that the actual energy savings are significant.

As for what I'm trying to achieve, that's pretty simple. I think it's a terrible mistake for a standards body as important as the IETF to rely on the spirit of the standard rather than the letter of the standard, especially when they contradict. If you are one of the hundreds of thousands of network engineers and software developers who work in the Internet, you can't know that a bunch of people in a meeting decided that the spirit of a specification differs from its text. All you have to go on is the text. When the founder of the next YouTube or Instagram or Google or Nicira takes my class and I ask them to write their code to follow an RFC (which I currently do), what should I tell them MUST means?

Phil