Re: [tsvwg] Status of ECN encapsulation drafts (i.e., stuck)

[Joseph Touch <[e-mail]>]

> On Mar 16, 2020, at 8:09 PM, Rodney W. Grimes <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> 
>>> On Mar 16, 2020, at 2:42 PM, Jonathan Morton <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> On 16 Mar, 2020, at 11:38 pm, Joseph Touch <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> That?s not always possible. If the net runs over minimal IPv6 links, there?s no way to ensure a traffic can support 1280B packets over 1280B tunnels.
> 
> True, not always possible, but very often practical and done as minimal IPv6 links generally only exist inside of tunneled tunnels :-)  ((Ie, GRE -> IPSec -> PPPoE))
> 
>>> 
>>> I think the 1280B minimum was intended to allow for the possibility of running through tunnels on conventional 1500B physical networks.
>> 
>> Actually, the 1280B is the path min; the receiver min is 1500B exactly to allow for this sort of frag/reassembly (where a tunnel egress *is* such a receiver). The 1500B comes from Ethernet; the 1280B is smaller deliberately.
> 
> receiver min?  I am not familiar with that term.

EMTU_R as defined in RFC 1122. See also draft-ietf-intarea-tunnels

> And as you state 1500B no doubt comes from the Ethernet specification.
> 
> I shall endorse Jonathans position with this:
> 	The 1280 IPv6 minMTU originated from a November 14, 1997 mailing
> 	from Steve Deering to the IPng mailing list, which stated:
> 	"In the ipngwg meeting in Munich, I proposed increasing the IPv6
>        minimum MTU from 576 bytes to something closer to the Ethernet MTU
>        of 1500 bytes, (i.e., 1500 minus room for a couple layers of
>        encapsulating headers, so that min- MTU-size packets that are
>        tunneled across 1500-byte-MTU paths won't be subject to
>        fragmentation/reassembly on ingress/egress from the tunnels, in most
>        cases).
> 
> So infact this is all meant to MINIMIZE fragmentation.

Except that it doesn’t unless you KNOW that the path supports 1500B. But there’s no rule in IPv6 that the EMTU_S min is 1280B *AND* the links MUST support 1500B.

I.e., that’s why the EMTU_S min is 1500B - so you can reassemble when you don’t know otherwise. But even when IPv6 was created there were problems with PMTUD.

Joe