Subject: Re: [rrg] RRG to hibernation

From: [email-masked] (Noel Chiappa)
Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2012 11:15:36 -0500 (EST)

> From: "Christian Huitema" <[email-masked]>

    > Indeed, any substantial change in routing and addressing would most
    > probably end up changing all hosts, or at least most of them.

Not necessarily, provided that the identity/location mapping layer is
deployed as a set of middleboxes (as opposed to being instantiated in all the
hosts). One of the benefits from that deployment model is that a new location
namespace can be deployed invisibly to the hosts.

And of course the routing is invisible to the hosts at the moment anyway, so
changing that without the hosts noticing is almost inevitable.

    > I also think that a research group should not necessarily shy away from
    > investigations that affect all hosts. If research comes out with a
    > brilliant shiny star on the horizon, then engineering might follow.

You're correct about that. I guess I didn't clearly distinguish in my
previous message between research and engineering. From the engineering
perspective, a design which requires changes to all hosts is, IMO, a
non-starter.

But at the same time, I definitely am already a follower of the model that,
if all we do is "hack on the edges of current solutions" without some larger
vision of where we are going in the long term (and that's often, or usually,
missing, in many of the incremental changes), those many small incremental
changes will result in nothing more than 'architecture cancer'. So, to me, a
"brilliant shiny star on the horizon" really is a requirement; you have to
know where you're going in the long term, and that destination has to be a
clear, clean, functional architecture. So perhaps we're not so far apart,
actually?

But in the end, as a practical matter, to get anything done, the path there
has to consist of many small steps, each of incremental nature...

	Noel

---

From: Tony Li <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2012 09:31:30 -0800

On Nov 12, 2012, at 8:15 AM, Noel Chiappa <[email-masked]> wrote:

> From the engineering

Why?

Now that upgrades are automated, the work effort involved for the average end user is not particularly high.  And the lifetime of end hosts seems to be somewhat limited, especially now that the bulk of the end hosts have become smart phones.

And if we subscribe to your proposal that we have and end-goal that's a clean architecture, then it seems like having a natural fit between the end host and the architecture is only natural.

Tony