Subject: [Int-area] I-D Action: draft-ietf-intarea-frag-fragile-04.txt

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 27 Nov 2018 10:26:11 -0800

A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts directories.
This draft is a work item of the Internet Area Working Group WG of the IETF.

        Title           : IP Fragmentation Considered Fragile
        Authors         : Ron Bonica
                          Fred Baker
                          Geoff Huston
                          Robert M. Hinden
                          Ole Troan
                          Fernando Gont
	Filename        : draft-ietf-intarea-frag-fragile-04.txt
	Pages           : 25
	Date            : 2018-11-27

Abstract:
   This document describes IP fragmentation and explains how it reduces
   the reliability of Internet communication.

   This document also proposes alternatives to IP fragmentation and
   provides recommendations for developers and network operators.

The IETF datatracker status page for this draft is:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-intarea-frag-fragile/

There are also htmlized versions available at:
https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-intarea-frag-fragile-04
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-intarea-frag-fragile-04

A diff from the previous version is available at:
https://www.ietf.org/rfcdiff?url2=draft-ietf-intarea-frag-fragile-04

Please note that it may take a couple of minutes from the time of submission
until the htmlized version and diff are available at tools.ietf.org.

Internet-Drafts are also available by anonymous FTP at:
ftp://ftp.ietf.org/internet-drafts/

---

From: Tom Herbert <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2018 10:19:46 -0800

Thanks for the update. I think section 7.3 strikes a pretty balance
between middleboxes implementation and requirements.

A couple of other comments:

>From the draft:

"7.1.  For Application Developers

   Protocol developers SHOULD NOT develop new protocols that rely on IP
   fragmentation."

This seems to be a recommendation for application developers, so maybe
this should read "Application protocol developers ...". Or is this the
recommendation intended to be broader than that to include transport
protocol developers for instance?

I believe use of the IPv6 flow label for stateless load balancing, and
other instances where packets need to be matched to flow, should be
RECOMMENDED. We have been using three tuple (addrs + flow label) for
Receive Packet Steering on the host for quite a while now, and I
believe there are switches that support this for ECMP also. The flow
label is a generic mechanism that works not only with fragmentation,
but any case where an intermediate node is unable or doesn't want to
to parse the transport layer header to get ports from the transport
layer. All major OSes should be setting flow label properly at this
point.

Tom

On Tue, Nov 27, 2018 at 10:26 AM <[email-masked]> wrote:
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