The IESG has approved the following document: - 'Internet Protocol, Version 6 (IPv6) Specification' (draft-ietf-6man-rfc2460bis-13.txt) as Internet Standard This document is the product of the IPv6 Maintenance Working Group. The IESG contact persons are Suresh Krishnan and Terry Manderson. A URL of this Internet Draft is: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-6man-rfc2460bis/ Technical Summary This document specifies the version of the IPv6 protocol that is being elevated to Internet Standard. This will obsolete RFC2460 that is the Draft Standard version of the protocol. This version incorporates fixes for Errata as well as updates to RFC2460. Working Group Summary The 6MAN working started working on advancing the IPv6 core specifications to Internet Standard at IETF93 July 2015. See: https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/93/slides/slides-93-6man-3.pdf The working group identified three RFCs to update (RFC2460, RFC4291, and RFC1981) by incorporating updates from other RFCs and Errata, and three to advance in place RFC4443, RFC3596, and RFC4941. After further analysis, the w.g. decided to not reclassify RFC4941 at this time. The working followed the requirements in RFC6410 for advancing a Draft Standard to Internet Standard. While RFC6410 describes how to handle Errata, it doesn't say anything about Updated-By RFCs. The working group, with the advice of our AD, incorporated the changes from the the Updated-By RFC and verified there was interoperability of the updates. All of the Updated-By and errata were brought into the new draft in small steps to allow thorough review of all of the changes. A summary and link to diff from the previous version was sent to the mailing list. All of the changes to each draft were also discussed in detail at IETF94, IETF95, IETF96, and IETF97. All of the changes from RFC2460 are summarized in Appendix B and are ordered by the Internet Draft that brought the change in. A working group last call for moving this and the other two documents to Internet Standard was started on 30 May 2016. Reviews were also requested. Issues found during the last call and reviews were entered into the 6MAN ticket system. These are now closed. The biggest issue raised was how to handle the issue of Extension Header insertion in this document. After many discussion on the mailing list and face to face meeting, there wasn’t a clear consensus. The chairs conducted an online survey that provided three choices: Ban header insertion, describe the problems with header insertion, or say nothing. The result of the survey was to describe the solution. The results and methodology used to evaluate the results can be seen at: https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ipv6/_gG2foiugk5B7w3TpnPvBbjHDzs This was discussed at the 6MAN session at IETF97 and on the mailing list after the meeting. The chairs believe there is a consensus to go forward with the text that is in draft-ietf-6man-rfc2460bis-08. AD's comment on IETF Last Call: The IETF last call discussion for this draft was mainly focused around the text in Section 4 that discusses the handling of extension headers. The biggest concern raised was that the current text is ambiguous on whether header insertion is allowed on intermediate nodes or not. There were some people arguing that an explicit prohibition is not necessary as the text is already clear, while others believed that explicitly listing the prohibitions will minimize any misunderstandings in the future. There was also a small number of people who wanted to explicitly allow header insertion and describe how to do it, but this was clearly out of scope for this draft (but may be in scope for future work in 6man). Overall, no one argued against the fact that the intent of the text in RFC2460 was to forbid insertion of extension headers on any other node but the source of the packet. The only argument made against adding clarifying text was that the text was already clear. Given this, I believe there is consensus to add explicit text about header insertion into the draft before it progresses further. This change has been done in version -09. Document Quality IPv6 is implemented on most platforms (hosts, routers, servers, etc.), including proprietary and open source. A list of products that have received the IPV6 Ready logo can be found at: https://www.ipv6ready.org/db/index.php/public/?o=4 Most major ISP now support IPv6, as well as many mobile operators. Google’s IPv6 stats at https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html show they are seeing now about 15% of their overall user traffic is IPv6. Country adoption is 29% in the US, Germany 27%, Finland 12%, Japan 14%, Brazil 11%. IPv6 users per AS can be found at http://stats.labs.apnic.net/aspop The University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH) analyzed the incorporated updates to insure they were implemented and interoperable. No problems were found. Their report can be found at: https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/95/slides/slides-95-6man-2.pdf Personnel The document shepherd is Ole Trøan. The responsible AD is Suresh Krishnan.
