31–40 of 167 posts
Had TCP/IP been 64bit to begin with things would be a lot different.
Things also could have been a lot different if IPv6 was just IPv4 with 128 bit addresses.
Had TCP/IP been 64bit to begin with things would be a lot different.
Things also could have been a lot different if IPv6 was just IPv4 with 128 bit addresses.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is possible 64-bits might have discouraged adopters who didn't want to waste expensive unnecessary extra bits at the time, so TCP/IP might not have taken off.
the ipv4+tcpv4 header is minimally 320 bits long so i don't think so
That said I agree that the world likely would have sucked it up and just gone with the 64 bit addresses, but there would have been a whole lot of grumbling for decades about the memory use. It's hard to imagine these days, but back then memory was outrageously expensive and enormous amounts of engineering went into minimizing memory use wherever possible. Having these addresses where we wouldn't even touch half of the bits for decades would have been unpopular with a lot of people, even if he would have been praised for being so forward thinking in the end.
On the other hand, the transition to IPv6 does give us a chance to fix some of the longstanding defects in IPv4 that would otherwise be baked into the protocol until the end of time, so it's not all bad.
#4: IP Fragmentation
UDP-based applications would have to do MTU discovery, but that's much easier when you're receiving truncated packets.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is possible 64-bits might have discouraged adopters who didn't want to waste expensive unnecessary extra bits at the time, so TCP/IP might not have taken off.
the ipv4+tcpv4 header is minimally 320 bits long so i don't think so
Doubling from 32 to 64 would have had a significant impact on routing table size and it would have dropped the back pressure to keep it from growing too quickly for TCAMs.
It would certainly be nice today, but it’s not a sure thing it wouldn’t have been killed off as “bloated” when there weren’t even 2^12 hosts.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Things also could have been a lot different if IPv6 was just IPv4 with 128 bit addresses.
People hate kludges and backward compatibility, but IPv4.1 with 5-byte addresses would have been the dominant standard by now.
This is thinking which appeals to people who don't understand the problem because it feels like a compromise, but you can't negotiate with silicon. If it expects a 4 byte address payload, then that's all it will ever handle.
Adding more bytes is exactly the same amount of redesign and replacement work as adding more. If the problem was solely software related, it would've been done by now.
In my experience, the biggest issue with TCP is that it assumes that the traffic is a single continuous byte stream, whereas the majority of applications send messages . Vint mentioned the lack of encryption as a mistake, but even on private networks, the 16-bit TCP checksums are too weak to protect against bit-flips. Many orgs noticed that enforcing encryption reduces "random" crashes and errors, because it also enf…
Had TCP/IP been 64bit to begin with things would be a lot different.
i dont think so really. He made the right choice. the world will adapt, eventually. I'd be willing to bet IPv6 wont be the last network upheaval we'll have as a civilization. (assuming we dont wipe ourselves out first) What do you think will happen if we generate some really really big AI, and they realize that they'll be super reliable if we made every synapse have its own IP, then we network all the AI's together a…
I mean, the estimate on the number of atoms in the observable universe is "only" 10^80, for comparison.
Most experiments, prototypes, and even full blown systems designed for the long term die well before 30-40 years and those extra addresses and features would ever be needed.
Much more human effort is wasted prematurely 'future proofing' systems and trying to predict the future. The brilliance of TCP/IP is its simplicity - if it had got more complex perhaps it would have been replaced in its entirety. We could be using Gopher over OpenDECNet.
> Before public-key cryptography came around, key distribution was a really messy manual process,” Cerf says. “It was awful, and it didn’t scale. So that’s why I didn’t try to push that into the Internet. I dont really think this is a mistake. Its not like there are great options even now for end2end security on the transport layer (like we have vpns but they mostly require having preshared secrets). It would have be…
[1]: I mean like really not. At all.