Subject: [Ipoverib] consensus call on EtherType, min MTU and DHCPv4

From: "H.K. Jerry Chu" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 10 Apr 2002 18:45:41 -0700 (PDT)

Folks,

We have passed the deadline for people to express their opinions.
For 2 and 3 (see the mail I sent on Sat. below) there seems to be
a unanimous support for them. For EtherType (1) the opinions remain
split.

Last week I asked people to bring "new, convincing evidence" when
arguing for or against EtherType. But unfortunately in the past few
days all I heard was either old arguments, or people reiterating their
positions. Since no one has brought forward any new, convincing
evidence against EtherType, and in both the mailing list and the
f2f meeting Bill and I feel there have been more people for EtherType
than against it, plus a number of people requesting EtherType are
actually working on real implementation, I hereby declare EtherType
to be the rough consensus of the WG to be included in the UD payload
of every IPoIB packet.

Over the past couple of days a couple of senior IBTA members have
reiterated their positions against EtherType. But in my opinion the
decision of including EtherType in the UD payload is at least partly
as the result of the IBTA failing to address people's need to have a
field in IB identifying the type of the data being encapsulated in
the UD payload. Some argued that the QP is supposed to serve that
purpose, but we are not even doing that for IPv4, ARP/RARP and IPv6.
I think the argument is rather weak.

I hope the debate on EtherType can stop now and we all move on to
work on other important issues. Vivek and I will update the relevant
drafts to reflect the decisions.

Your friendly co-chairs Bill & Jerry

----------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sat, 6 Apr 2002 12:15:18 -0800 (PST)
From: "H.K. Jerry Chu" <hkchu@jurassic>
Subject: 4/9 deadline for a consensus call
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Cc: [email-masked]
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At the Minneapolis/IETF meeting we had a "room concensus" on the
following:

1. Embedding EtherType in the IPoIB UD payload.
2. Requiring IPv4 over IB to have a minimal MTU of 1500.
(This effectively rules out all the IB MTUs less than 2K for
running IPoIB.)
3. Using DHCP broadcast flag to solve the chaddr length problem
so the IPoIB hardware address stays as QPN+GID.

During the past two weeks since the meeting minutes was published
I have not heard of any objection or different opinion. The DHCPv4
over IB work seems to be going well too. So I'm inclined to declare
the above as WG concensus. But I'm willing to wait til next Tuesday
(4/9) COW for anyone to voice a different opinion. If you do decide
to object, I'd urge you to bring forward a strong case, e.g. new,
convincing evidence that shows the above is really problematic. We
have spent enough time bashing these topics it's time for us to
move on.                       
			       
Your friendly co-chair

_______________________________________________
IPoverIB mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ipoverib

---

From: Michael Krause <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2002 06:33:06 -0700

>to be the rough consensus of the WG to be included in the UD payload

What is the specification of Ethertype other than it is 16-bits of space 
followed by the next set of headers?  Is an implementation required to 
process this field if it does not want to do so?  Is Ethertype required for 
all IB transport services that may support IP traffic - it seems that it 
must be to remain consistent from an implementation point of view.

>the UD payload.

In essence, the consensus is that the IP over IB workgroup is defining the 
official Raw protocol on behalf of the IBTA since in many people's opinion 
the IBTA screwed up.  As such, it would be beneficial to simply write a 
draft with this as the stated goal so that anyone can use it independent of 
IP over IB's charter for such purposes and then have the IP over IB 
specification reference said draft.  This will be much cleaner and at least 
make everyone who may want to implement such a service not have to go 
searching within an IP over IB specification to find this non-IP focused 
functionality.

>Some argued that the QP is supposed to serve that

Just as weak as hijacking one spec to include functionality that has 
nothing to do with the stated charter of this workgroup.  Consensus has 
been reached so I'll let it die.

Mike

---

From: "Roger Ronald" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2002 09:46:39 -0500

Sounds roughly like a proposal for a "snap" header.

Mike's idea would not change anything in the byte stream (all the same bits
would be sent and dealt with in the same way) but would 
make Ethertype a link encapsulation header consisting of a single
field.

It's a nice idea since it provides all the bits that every one wants,
but it puts them into the proper layering.

RR
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Michael Krause" <[email-masked]>
To: "H.K. Jerry Chu" <[email-masked]>; <[email-masked]>
Sent: Thursday, April 11, 2002 8:33 AM
Subject: Re: [Ipoverib] consensus call on EtherType, min MTU and DHCPv4

> At 06:45 PM 4/10/2002 -0700, H.K. Jerry Chu wrote:
<snip>

> searching within an IP over IB specification to find this non-IP focused 
<snip>