And by that analogy, the previous BIOS version was released in 1981, and modern networking is hamstrung by its design which assumed "4 billion addresses ought to be enough for anybody" and that it needed to be manageable by an 8-bit OS with 64KB of RAM.
IPv4 is a brilliant protocol for having been published 43 years ago. There aren't a whole lot of technologies that old still widely used. I mean, I'm glad my NVMe drive doesn't have to shove bits through an ST412 interface.
> And by that analogy, the previous BIOS version was released in 1981, and modern networking is hamstrung by its design which assumed "4 billion addresses ought to be enough for anybody" and that it needed to be manageable by an 8-bit OS with 64KB of RAM.
I'm not sure if it makes the analogy better or worse, but this is what happened; BIOS was born in ~1981 (I think), had severe shortcomings that were partially mitigated over time but you can only mitigate so much, UEFI is a better replacement, BIOS->UEFI was a somewhat rocky migration, that migration was made worse by extra stuff getting bundled in (secure boot), and this led to a significant chunk of the population deliberately avoiding it at least for a while. The only real difference is that UEFI has long since become standard, while IPv6 is still fighting for adoption.
I really wanted to disagree with you but sadly that's how it was treated in secure environments a few years ago: "ipv6.disable=1". Everything that's not in needed would be disabled. Nobody wanted to be the first to "need it" and learn all that stuff, if it works with ipv4, stick with it.
Sure, one can figure out the split DNS, tunneling/no tunneling, DHCPv6, multiple addresses per interface, additional filtering rules, or just you know "ipv6.disable=1" and worry about in a few more years perhaps.
I suspect you haven't read the errata sheets for any modern EFI or even worse BMC? There is so much buggy crap in there that users are likely to run into that patching your firmware is a good idea just for stability and performance before you even consider integrity and privacy.
kstrauser|1 year ago
IPv4 is a brilliant protocol for having been published 43 years ago. There aren't a whole lot of technologies that old still widely used. I mean, I'm glad my NVMe drive doesn't have to shove bits through an ST412 interface.
ibcj|1 year ago
yjftsjthsd-h|1 year ago
I'm not sure if it makes the analogy better or worse, but this is what happened; BIOS was born in ~1981 (I think), had severe shortcomings that were partially mitigated over time but you can only mitigate so much, UEFI is a better replacement, BIOS->UEFI was a somewhat rocky migration, that migration was made worse by extra stuff getting bundled in (secure boot), and this led to a significant chunk of the population deliberately avoiding it at least for a while. The only real difference is that UEFI has long since become standard, while IPv6 is still fighting for adoption.
rdtsc|1 year ago
Sure, one can figure out the split DNS, tunneling/no tunneling, DHCPv6, multiple addresses per interface, additional filtering rules, or just you know "ipv6.disable=1" and worry about in a few more years perhaps.
crest|1 year ago