RE: RFC3697 [Re: [RRG] FLOWv6: IPv6 Flow Label to control DFZ forwarding]

["Tony Li" <tony.li@tony.li>]

|Were you or any other RRG people involved in the creation of the
|Flow Label?  


As an onlooker, my perception was that the IPv6 header ended up having too
many free bits in it and that compressing it would have cause unfortunate
consequences for header alignment on 64 bit processors, so the thought was
to leave it effectively as reserved space.  However, there were so many
poorly justified uses for the space, that the IPv6 folks decided to allocate
it to the then-popular notion of a flow label.  This kept others from
requesting header bits and did not force them into a precise semantic
definition for the field.

Effectively, today, it's reserved space.

My $.02,
Tony


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