Subject: Ethernet Chipsets Registration

From: "Dan romascanu DVP-TA" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 Jul 98 9:32:05 +0300

Hub-MIBers,

During the review of the Etehrnet-like Interfaces MIB (now RFC 2358), 
Harald and Bert raised the issue of the chipset lists, which is part of 
this document. The hardware chipsets list, covering now 50% or more of 
the MIB text itself, needs to be detached in their opinion from the core 
of the management MIB objects. This would allow the registration of new 
chipsets to happen in parallel, without influencing the evolution of the 
MIB, and without requiring this WG to be active forever, just to update 
this list.

There are some precedents on managing such lists, with the assistance of 
IANA. One such example is RFC 2278 - IANA Charset Registration 
Procedures. The following needs to be done by the WG in order to 
establish a new procedure. 

a. issue a Informational RFC of ours, similar to RFC 2278 
b. find a competent and community-dedicated person, who would volunteer 
to act as a designated expert (registrar), and manage this list.
c. break out the OIDs list from the Ethernet-like MIB and (optional) 
issue a informational RFC including the latest updated list.That list 
could go through periodical revisions.

I would like to put on the table of the WG the proposal of implementing 
such a procedure starting with the next iteration of the Ethernet-like 
interfaces MIB, which we are chartered to do for 1 Gigabit Ethernet. If 
approved, this would mean that the next Ethernet-like MIB will not 
include the hardware chipsets list, and we will issue the informational 
RFC(s) in parallel with the next version of RFC 2358. Please study this, 
and comment. I would like to include this item on the agenda of the WG 
meeting in Chicago, and take a decision by then. 

Dan

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Dan Romascanu,
Systems Architecture Group Manager,
LANNET Ltd.,
Voice: 972-3-645-8414, e-mail: [email-masked]
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From: John Flick <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 Jul 1998 12:05:06 -0700 (PDT)

Dan,

I kind of have mixed feelings about this one.  I agree that the
monumental list of OIDs should be separated out from the Ethernet-like 
Interfaces MIB.  I guess I am less convinced that we need an
IANA-maintained OID list.  It was probably a mistake to enlarge the
list in RFC 2358 in the first place.

The ChipSet object is used to uniquely identify the chipset being used 
on a particular Ethernet interface.  There is no reason why this
cannot be managed by individual vendors.  I believe you made the
comment that this would affect interperability.  I guess I don't see
why it would be any less interoperable than sysObjectID.  All that is
really needed is for the mapping from OID to chipset to be unique (in
fact, the mapping the other direction does not even need to be
unique).  As long as a vendor publishes the mapping from OID to
chipset that they are using in their implementation, we are fine.
There really shouldn't be any problem if system vendor A and router
vendor B are both using the same chipset, but assign differend OIDs to 
that chipset under their proprietary MIBs, as long as they both
publish the assignment.

The flip side, however, is that this has not been happening.  Vendors
have not been publishing OID assignments.  I have encountered many
implementations that just return 0.0 for the ChipSet object.  We also
have the problem of the appearance of priviledge for the chips that
have historical assignments in 2358 and before.

It would I think be best if we had some way to encourage vendors to
actually implement the ChipSet object and release their OID assigments 
to chipsets without incurring the overhead of IANA having to manage
the name space, and having to find a volunteer willing to be the
designated expert.  (Isn't that why this was an OID to begin with?).

John