RE: the IPv6 Ethernet lost bits - fffe

["Dunn, Jeffrey H." <jdunn at mitre.org>]

Tim,

That sounds more like a call to update the spec than to ignore the
additional functionality available with variable length prefixes.

Best Regards, 
  
Jeffrey Dunn 
Info Systems Eng., Lead 
MITRE Corporation.
(301) 448-6965 (mobile)


-----Original Message-----
From: ipv6-bounces at ietf.org [mailto:ipv6-bounces at ietf.org] On Behalf Of
Tim Chown
Sent: Wednesday, October 01, 2008 10:48 AM
To: ipv6 at ietf.org
Subject: Re: the IPv6 Ethernet lost bits - fffe

On Wed, Oct 01, 2008 at 04:36:57PM +0200, Jeroen Massar wrote:
> Alexandru Petrescu wrote:
> > For what it's worth,
> > 
> > Whenever statelessly auto-configuring an IPv6 address on Ethernet
the
> > 10th and 11th bytes are always 'fffe', hardcoded.  These are lost
bits.
> 
> The world has more devices than Ethernet. The Ethernet MAC -> EUI-64
> trick (thus your lost fffe bits) is just a trick. Take firewire for
> example which uses full EUI-64.

Well, Vista uses 'random' host addresses, 64-bit ones.   If the spec
had been different way back when, these could equally have been 32 or
48 bits instead.   But it wasn't.

-- 
Tim


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