Re: [tcpm] [v6ops] Flow Label Load Balancing

[Fernando Gont <[e-mail]>]

On 3/12/20 14:30, Tom Herbert wrote:
[....]
> 
> There are two apropos statements in RFC6437:
> 
> "There is no way to verify whether a flow label has been modified en
> route or whether it belongs to a uniform distribution.  Therefore, no
> Internet-wide mechanism can depend mathematically on unmodified and
> uniformly distributed flow labels; they have a "best effort" quality."
> 
> "From an upper-layer viewpoint, a flow could consist of all packets in
> one direction of a specific transport connection or media stream.
> However, a flow is not necessarily 1:1 mapped to a transport
> connection."
> 
> So building a load balancer, or any other intermediate network device,
> that *depends* on the flow label to be consistent for the life of a
> transport connection and 1:1 mapped to a transport connection is
> contrary to this guidance. 

We don't need 1:1. We just need 1:N where N is how flows would be 
aggregated/grouped for the purpose of load-sharing.



> The ship has already sailed on this in
> deployment, and even if the protocol requirements were to be
> sufficiently tightened that would take years to reach full effect and
> that would preclude other use cases where modifying the flow label is
> useful. If a stable 1:1 mapped identifier for transport ports is
> needed in the network layer, it might make sense to create a new HBH
> option for that.

The above said, I would probably agree that if havinga non-stable FL 
breaks something, whatever it breaks is probably already broken, since 
there's not even a checksum to try to detect whether the IPv6 header has 
been corrupted.



> Personally, if I were building a load balancer I'd
> use neither the flow label nor transport ports for entropy, I'd look
> at using the destination address since 128 bits allows plenty of bits
> of entropy, it's consistent per transport flow and always set in an
Problem is that if you have two systems that need a lot of banswitdth 
(e.g., they are transferring file via several TCP connections)< you 
wouldn't be able to load-share them -- since the result of the hash 
would be the sme for all TCP connections....

Thanks,
-- 
Fernando Gont
SI6 Networks
e-mail: [e-mail]
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