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We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

pavpanchekha.com

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Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

#171

Post by pavpanchekha »

adrianmonk wrote: post #104

> IPv4 would have had 36-bit addresses, about 64 billion total. That would still be enough right now, and even with continuing growth in India and Africa it would probably be enough for about a decade more. [ ... ] When exhaustion does set in, it would plausibly at a time where there's not a lot of growth left in penetration, population, or devices, and mild market mechanisms instead of NATs would be the solution. I…

Author here. My argument in the OP was that we maybe would never need to transition. With 36-bit addresses we'd probably get all the people and devices to fit. While there would still be early misallocation (hell, Ford and Mercedes still hold /8s) that could probably be corrected by buying/selling addresses without having to go to NATs and related. An even bigger address space might be required in some kind of buzzword bingo AI IoT VR world but 36 bits would be about enough even with the whole world online.

Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

#172

Post by mrheosuper »

pavpanchekha wrote: post #165
zamadatix wrote: post #4

Because we have 8 bit bytes we are familiar with the famous or obvious cases multiples-of-8-bits ran out, and those cases sound a lot better with 12.5% extra bits. What's harder to see in this kind of thought experiment is what the famously obvious cases multiples-of-9-bits ran out would have been. The article starts to think about some of these towards the end, but it's hard as it's not immediately obvious how many…

Author here. Actually I doubt we'd have picked 27-bit addresses. That's about 134M addresses; that's less than the US population (it's about the number of households today?) and Europe was also relevant when IPv4 was being designed. In any case, if we had chosen 27-bit addresses, we'd have hit exhaustion just a bit before the big telecom boom that built out most of the internet infrastructure that holds back transiti…

Nothing NAT can't solve /s.

Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

#173

Post by billseng »

What if the first bits told you how long the byte was, and you just kept reading the length of the byte until you got some terminating sequence, then that would be followed by some error correction for the length and terminating sequence with a couple more terminating sequences, one could be ignored since once might be corrupted, following by a variable length byte, with its own error correction and more error correction? It’s just so obvious y’all!

Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

#174

Post by pavpanchekha »

kyralis wrote: post #76

"We've guessed wrong historically on data sizes, and if we had 9 bit bytes those guesses (if otherwise unchanged) would have been less wrong, so 9 bit bytes would be better!" is an extremely tenuous argument. Different decisions would have been made. We need to be better at estimating require sizes, not trying to trick ourselves into accomplishing that by slipping in an extra bit to our bytes.

Author here. The argument was that by numerological coincidence, a couple of very important numbers (world population, written characters, seconds in an epoch, and plausible process memory usage) just happen to lie right near 2^16 / 2^32. I couldn't think of equally important numbers (for a computer) near ~260k or ~64B. We just got unlucky with the choice of 8-bit bytes.

Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

#175

Post by pavpanchekha »

folsom wrote: post #6

I don't know what if we ended up with a 27 bit address space? As far as ISPs competing on speeds in the mid 90s, for some reason it feels like historical retrospectives are always about ten years off.

Author here, copied from another comment above.

Actually I doubt we'd have picked 27-bit addresses. That's about 134M addresses; that's less than the US population (it's about the number of households today?) and Europe was also relevant when IPv4 was being designed. In any case, if we had chosen 27-bit addresses, we'd have hit exhaustion just a bit before the big telecom boom, a lucky coincidence meaning the consumer internet would largely require another transition anyway. Transitioning from 27-bit to I don't know 45-bit or 99-bit or whatever we'd choose next wouldn't be as hard as the IPv6 transition today.

Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

#177

Post by dmitrygr »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #145
dmitrygr wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll assume you are speaking in good faith, so i'll reply so as well: I do not want to be a "reasonably-skilled admin". Not my job nor desire. I want DHCP to work and NAT to exist which acts as a de-facto firewall and hides my internal network config from the outside world. All with zero or fewer clicks in my home router's config. With IPv4 this works. With IPv6 it does not. Simple choice for me then: find the IPv6 c…

That's the fault of whoever designed the router, not IPv6.

As a consumer, I don’t care if it’s Santa Claus’s fault. IPv4: works, IPv6: doesn’t. I don’t even need to know what IPv6 means. I just need to know: Turn it off to make things work.

As a technologist, growing up involves learning not to blame the consumer. They are not holding it wrong, you just designed it in a dumb way.

Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

#178

Post by pavpanchekha »

zokier wrote: post #41

Another interesting thought experiment would what if we went down to 6 bit bytes instead? Then the common values probably would be 24 and especially 48 bits (4 and 8 bytes), but 36 bit values might have appeared also in some places. In many ways 6 bit bytes would have had similar effect than 9 bit bytes; 18 and 36 bits would have been 3 and 6 bytes instead of 2 and 4 bytes. Notably with 6 bit bytes text encoding woul…

Author here. I agree that this would have a similar effect; we'd probably still end up with 36-bit or 48-bit IP addresses (though 30-bit would have been possible and bad). We'd probably end up with a transition from 24-bit to 48-bit addresses. 18-bit Unicode still seems likely. Not sure how big timestamps would end up being; 30-bit is possible and bad, but 48-bit seems more likely.

Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

#179

Post by djcapelis »

Most proposals for 9 bit bytes weren't for adopting 8 bits of data in a byte, they were to have 8 bits for data and 1 bit for something else, typically either error detection or differentiating between control/data. Very few folks argued for 9 bit bytes in the sense of having 9 bits of data per byte.

9 bit bytes never made significant headway because a 12.5% overhead cost for any of these alternatives is pretty wild. But there are folks and were folks then who thought it was worth debating and there certainly are advantages to it, especially if you look at use beyond memory storage. (i.e. closer to "Harvard" architecture separation between data / code and security implications around strict separation of control / data in applications like networking.)

It's worth noting that SECDED ECC memory adds about a 20% overhead, though it can correct single bit flips whereas 9-bit bytes with a parity bit can only detect (but not correct) bit flips which makes it useful in theory but not very useful in practice.

Re: We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

#180

Post by SchemaLoad »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #31
bawolff wrote: post #13

> But in a world with 9-bit bytes IPv4 would have had 36-bit addresses, about 64 billion total. Or we would have had 27 bit addresses and ran into problems sooner.

That might've been better, actually. The author makes the mistake of "more time would've made this better", but we've had plenty of time to transition to IPv6. People simply don't because they are lazy and IPv4 works for them. More time wouldn't help that, any more than a procrastinating student benefits when the deadline for a paper gets extended. But on the other hand, if we had run out sooner , perhaps IPv4 wouldn…

The internet also fundamentally changed in the middle of the rollout. End user devices stopped being directly accessible because this was a security issue, they stopped being always online because they mostly run on battery now, and IP addresses costing money became a kind of barrier to spam and abuse.

Even if we could directly address every device on the internet, you'd still mostly want to run through a middle server anyway so you can send files and messages while the receiver device is sleeping, or to sync between multiple devices.

Pretty much the only loss was people self hosting servers, but as long as you aren't behind CGNAT you can just set up DDNS and be fine. Every ISP I've been with lets you opt out of CGNAT as well as pay for a static IP.

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