On 28 jul 2009, at 20:57, Templin, Fred L wrote:
I intend to bring it back to life in a much improved incarnation at some point, didn't get that done before this meeting.
Is it going to require updates to all routers and hosts,
Only the ones that want to send packets larger than the IPvX-over-... RFC allows without manually configuring a non-standard MTU.
as well as IPv6 specs to be updated?
No, just a few new ND/RA options and some ARP hackery when applied to IPv4.
The point is that if a vendor ships a NIC capable of 9000-byte ethernet packets, the system using that NIC will send 9000-byte packets to other systems with the same capability, but send regular 1500-byte packets to systems that don't implement the new stuff. And 2250-byte packets to systems that support 2250 bytes etc. As a bonus, it's possible to let routers indicate in RAs that jumboframes are possible even if other systems don't implement the new stuff so that you can work together with older boxes that do jumbos but not the new options.