Owen DeLong wrote:
IPv6 optional header chain, even after it was widely recognized that IPv4 options are useless/harmful and were deprecated is an example of IPv6 bloat.
Extensive use of link multicast for nothing is another example of IPv6 bloat. Note that IPv4 works without any multicast.
Yes, but IPv6 works without any broadcast. At the time IPv6 was being developed, broadcasts were rather inconvenient and it was believed that ethernet switches (which were just beginning to be a thing then) would facilitate more efficient capabilities by making extensive use of link multicast instead of broadcast.
No, the history around it is that there was some presentation in IPng WG by ATM people stating that ATM, or NBMA (Non-Broadcast Multiple Access)in general, is multicast capable though not broadcast capable, which was blindly believed by most, if not all excluding *me*, people there. It should be noted that IPv6 was less bloat because ND abandoned its initial goal to support IP over NBMA.
Turns out multicast was arguably a wrong guess, but all indications available at the time were that it was a good bet.
See above.
There is still a valid argument to be made that in a switched ethernet world, multicast could offer efficiencies if networks were better tuned to accommodate it vs. broadcast.
That is against the CATENET model that each datalink only contain small number of hosts where broadcast is not a problem at all. Though, in CERN, single Ethernet with thousands of hosts was operated, of course poorly, it was abandoned to be inoperational a lot before IPv6, which is partly why IPv6 is inoperational. Masataka Ohta