Re: [trill] Poll for WG adoption of draft-perlman-trill-smart-endnodes

[Thomas Narten <[e-mail]>]

> As announced that the TRILL WG meeting yesterday, this is a poll for
> TRILL WG adoption of draft-perlman-trill-smart-endnodes-02.txt. It is
> expected to run through November 24th.

I am opposed to the WG taking on this document. My reasoning is
simple: this document is not needed and is unlikely ever to be
implemented in a product or see deployment in anything more than a
research setting. The stated motivation behind this document is to
move (offload) the [Dest, RB] mappings an RB maintains into a "smart
endnode", thereby reducing the size of the table in RBs.

I find the problem motivation and proposed solution direction
uncompelling.

First, today's memory sizes in switching devices is quite large (and
of course getting larger). I just don't see reducing the table size in
RBs as an actual problem that needs solving in practice -- and
especially not by having end hosts take on this responsibility. Do we
have any feedback from actual deployments suggestion RB table sizes
are too limited?

Second, a host is unlikely to implement this. They have little
motivation to do so.  The cost is implementation/operational
complexity, and the only benefit is it it would support what arguably
would be a low-end and marginal RB product. A better investment would
be to get a better RB.

Up leveling, this document exemplifies a general trend this WG has of
taking on marginal work that has little or no real likelyhood of ever
being used or deployed. I think the WG would focus on getting its (few
remaining) core items completed, and then shutdown until a time that
actual deployment experience results in the need to do additional
work.

Bottom line: this work is not needed and the WG should stop taking on
work that has at best marginal value.

Thomas