Date: Mon, 22 Apr 1996 13:46:07 -0700 From: bmah@cs.berkeley.edu (Bruce A. Mah) To: Petri Helenius <pete@sms.fi> Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: IPv6 Message-ID: <199604222046.NAA08896@premise.CS.Berkeley.EDU> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 22 Apr 1996 21:30:05 %2B0300." <199604221830.VAA15691@silver.sms.fi>
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Petri Helenius writes: > David Greenman writes: > > >The new TCP/IP protocol IPv6 will be soon on the net. > > >When could be IPv6 available for FreeBSD ? > > > > Soon? You think that (likely) 5 years from now is "soon"? It hasn't > > standardized enough yet and there are several competing implementations. I > t's > > not clear yet which one is the best. > > > Not to start a protocol war here but your statements seem to be a little > out of date since IPv6 is standardized today and interoperable implementations > exists, some even running connectable from the current entity known as > The Internet. Let me toss out some possibly helpful info: 1. Some aspects of IPv6 are still being debated. One example is the set of extensions to the BSD sockets API to support IPv6, which just had a new Internet draft released last week. It is true that the packet formats are "standardized today" but it takes more than that to have a working protocol deployment. 2. Yes, interoperable implementations exist, but they're prototypes. For people who want to experiment with software in this form, source code is available. I'm aware of at least three possibly-applicable implementations (for BSD 4.4Lite from NRL, for BSD/OS from the WIDE project, and for NetBSD from INRIA). More information can be found on the IPv6 home page: http://playground.sun.com/pub/ipng/html/ipng-main.html There is an overlay network designed to support routing IPv6 packets over tunnels between IPv6-connected "islands", similar to how the MBONE works for IP multicast: http://www-6bone.lbl.gov/6bone/ So you could say that to a certain extent, IPv6 is happening now, and you could (theoretically at least) get a FreeBSD box to talk IPv6. I think the answer to the original question ("When could be IPv6 [sic] available for FreeBSD") depends a lot on how the person wanted to use it. If they were willing to fold an existing prototype implementation into FreeBSD, and use an experimental infrastructure, the answer is "now". If they wanted it for production use (which sounds more like the case), they should wait awhile. Bruce.
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