Re: BFD WG adoption for draft-haas-bfd-large-packets

[Jeffrey Haas <[e-mail]>]

Reshad,

On Fri, Oct 26, 2018 at 06:32:26PM +0000, Reshad Rahman (rrahman) wrote:
>On 2018-10-25, 11:38 AM, "Jeffrey Haas" <[e-mail]> wrote:
> >     The draft I had previously worked on with Xiao Min discussing probing using
> >     BFD Echo had the concept of probes that would happen wherein the session is
> >     not torn down.  The example carries similarly with the "send occasional".
>
> <RR> We discussed use of echo at IETF102. The large-packets draft mentions
> that echo can only be used for single-hop, hence the need for padding the
> control packets. But isn't single-hop Albert's main use-case? 

It's Albert's primary use case.  And, I think a common related one is
protecting tunnels of various flavors; e.g. GRE or IPsec.

> I believe we
> should add the echo option in the large-packets draft, it has the benefit
> that you get the desired functionality even if only 1 side of the WAN link
> supports echo. I realize not all implementations support echo so they
> might have to do pad control packets instead.

While I don't think Albert or I would have any objections to adding Echo
discussion in the existing document, we perhaps risk running into one of the
issues Xiao and I had briefly discussed.  Echo is intentionally
under-specified in RFC 5880 et seq.  While it's possible that we can simply
put in a discussion section that says "if you use Echo mode with similar
padding, you can get similar benefit", I think that may be as far as we want
to go.

The related observation is that nothing stops an Echo implementation from
doing this with no changes to the protocol. :-)

-- Jeff