On Wed, 31 Mar 2010 16:53:37 -0400, Michael Holstein <michael.holstein@csuohio.edu> wrote:
If this is a strictly "hardware" discussion, v6 "works" on a variety of models, albeit not with stock firmware. ... This suggests that Cisco (et.al.) can release an "official" firmware image to support v6 on existing devices whenever they're sufficiently motivated to do so.
Yes and no. Many of the uber-cheap models simply don't have the processing power or memory to do IPv6 well. (Some would say they don't do IPv4 well. I'm one of them.) Pure here's-a-packet-here's-where-it-goes switching can be done in almost any model as long as the v6 stack doesn't make the image too large to fit in the 4K rom. Doing anything remotely complicated, like tunneling and stateful firewalling, makes the image much too large and eats way too much ram. (This is also way many of the cheap models do not run linux and generally cannot run a usable linux image.) On the more expensive, higher end models, yes, they can run rather complex IPv4/6 stacks quite well. However, the bottom is that there is simply little to no consumer demand for IPv6 support -- esp. in North America (read: US) where most of these things are sold. --Ricky