On Tue, Mar 03, 2009 at 06:15:32AM +0100, Andreas Fink wrote:
Sorry folks but now you go off the planet. If one thinks an embedded device can't do IPv6 because of CPU load, think again. An Wireless access point using OpenWRT does support IPv6 and just works. I can't remember how slow those boxes are but their speed is just enough to cope with ethernet and wlan.
Main problem with consumer electronics is that chinese and taiwanese companies are unable to design HW or SW so they buy in some reference design with a crapy OS on them, rebrand the administration homepage and design a plastic housing for them. They don't care about features as long as the few million pieces they build are getting sold.
Byteswapping of addresses and netmasks takes like a nanosecond on the systems which require swapping. So dont waste your time on that. CRC checking is way more CPU intensive on TCP but that's done nowadays in hardware on the ethernet card on modern systems and its the same for IPv4 and IPv6.
And most hardware checksumming on modern ethernet cards is broken. Only the very last Broadcom and Intel cards include an IPv4 and IPv6 checksumming that seems works. Most other cards either don't support IPv6 or fail horribly in edge cases. I would be happy if those HW vendors actually manage to create a correctly working DMA engine without stupid limitations but ethernet chips seem to be designed by interns.