On Sun, 1 Oct 2023 at 06:07, Owen DeLong via NANOG <nanog@nanog.org> wrote:
Not sure why you think FIB compression is a risk or will be a mess. It’s a pretty straightforward task.
Also people falsely assume that the parts they don't know about, are risk free and simple. While in reality there are tons of proprietary engineering choices to make devices perform in expected environments, not arbitrary environments. So already today you could in many cases construct specific FIB, which exposes these compromises and makes devices not perform. There are dragons everywhere, but we can remain largely ignorant of them, as these engineering choices tend to be reasonable. Sometimes they are abused by shops like EANTC and Miercom for marketing reasons for ostensibly 'independent' tests. I think this compression is part of this continuum, magic inside the box I hope works because I can't begin to have a comprehensive understanding exactly how much risk I am carrying. Pretty much all performant boxes no longer have bandwidth to store all packets in memory (partial buffering), many of them have 'hot' and 'cold' prefixes. You just gotta hope, you're not gonna be able to prove anything, and by trying to do so, you're more likely to increase your costs due to false positives than you are to find an actionable problem. Most problems don't matter, figuring out which problem needs to be fixed is hard. -- ++ytti