On (2007-04-12 11:20 +0200), Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
What do you guys think about a mechanism that allows hosts and routers on a subnet to automatically discover the MTU they can use towards other systems on the same subnet, so that: 1. It's no longer necessary to limit the subnet MTU to that of the least capable system
2. It's no longer necessary to manage 1500 byte+ MTUs manually
To me this sounds adding complexity for rather small pay-off. And then we'd have to ask IXP people, would the enable this feature if it was available? If so, why don't they offer high MTU VLAN today? And in the end, pay-off of larger MTU is quite small, perhaps some interrupts are saved but not sure how relevant that is in poll() based NIC drivers. Of course bigger pay-off would be that users could use tunneling and still offer 1500 to LAN. IXP peeps, why are you not offering high MTU VLAN option?
From my point of view, this is biggest reason why we today generally don't have higher end-to-end MTU. I know that some IXPs do, eg. NetNOD but generally it's not offered even though many users would opt to use it.
Thanks, -- ++ytti