On Sun, 4 Apr 2010 14:05:50 -0700 Scott Howard <scott@doc.net.au> wrote:
On Sun, Apr 4, 2010 at 1:51 PM, Matthew Kaufman <matthew@matthew.at> wrote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAC_address
The IEEE expects the MAC-48 space to be exhausted no sooner than the year 2100[3]; EUI-64s are not expected to run out in the foreseeable future.
And this is what happens when you can use 100% of the bits on "endpoint identity" and not waste huge sections of them on the decision bits for "routing topology".
Having around 4 orders of magnitude more addresses probably doesn't hurt either...
Although even MAC-48 addresses are "wasteful" in that only 1/4 of them are assignable to/by vendors, with the other 3/4 being assigned to multicast and local addresses (the MAC equivalent of RFC1918)
Has anybody considered lobbying the IEEE to do a point to point version of Ethernet to gets rid of addressing fields? Assuming an average 1024 byte packet size, on a 10Gbps link they're wasting 100+ Mbps. 100GE / 1TE starts to make it even more worth doing. Actually the minimum 64 byte packet size could probably go too, as that was only there for collision detection.
Scott.