Re: [Rtg-dt-encap-considerations] draft-rtg-dt-encap-02 for review

Erik Nordmark <nordmark@sonic.net> Thu, 21 May 2015 15:54 UTC

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Date: Thu, 21 May 2015 08:54:21 -0700
From: Erik Nordmark <nordmark@sonic.net>
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Subject: Re: [Rtg-dt-encap-considerations] draft-rtg-dt-encap-02 for review
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On 5/20/15 3:28 PM, Tom Herbert wrote:
>>> Would change "Avoid full packet checksums in encapsulation if
>>> possible" to "Avoid full packet checksums in cases where necessary
>>> devices cannot support them"
>> I don't know what others think, but that seems to be confusing. It seems to
>> imply that some devices are sub-standard and can be fixed, when in fact it
>> is impossible to do a full packet checksum, where the checksum is placed in
>> the header, in a low-latency cut-through device.
>>
> Note this only applies to devices terminating encapsulation, not to
> other middleboxes or switches in the underlay path.
Yes, those are the devices I'm concerned about.
> Also, w.r.t. UDP
> encapsulation we already have several protocols that provide the
> answer: UDP checksums on TX are optional for IPv4 and optional for
> IPv6 only under the requirements of RFC6935 and RFC6936. This allows
> for hardware that does not support UDP checksum to be deployed, but
> hopefully with awareness by an administrator as to the tradeoffs of
> disabling checksums. There are no provisions to ignore checksums on
> receive, so if a device does not support UDP checksums sees a non-zero
> checksum it should drop the packet (IMO VXLAN allowing RX checksums to
> be ignored is not correct).
>
I think it would be unfortunate if the IETF standardized an 
encapsulation protocol which requires UDP checksums of the complete 
packet over IPv6 but not over IPv4. That would at best slow down the 
transition to IPv6 as a viable underlay.

We have bad experience with no UDP checksum for actual UDP payload (I 
recall UDP over NFS at Sun and bit errors).
Hence requiring UDP checksums makes a lot of sense.
However, when the payload is protected by a checksum and is 
encapsulated, then the only issue is some misdelivery or mishandling 
(wrong QoS) due to undetected corruption in the UDP header.

So to me it doesn't make sense to require an outer checksum which covers 
the encaps plus whole payload when there is another checksum for the 
payload.

    Erik