Subject: [rbridge] Some routine changes to the specifications draft

From: Donald.Eastlake at motorola.com (Eastlake III Donald-LDE008)
Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2007 11:54:07 -0400

Unless there is some objection, the following changes, which I hope will
be non-controversial, will be made in the specification draft:

(1) There are no IANA Considerations for the reserved bits in the shim
or for version number values. I suggest that both require a Standards
Action as modified by RFC 4020.

(2) The draft currently says nothing about the reserved bits. Typical
IETF language would be "must be zero on transmission and are ignored on
receipt". But, thinking about it, I'm not so sure that's right in this
case. Zero on transmit is fine but, of the seven reserved bits, perhaps
some of them should be ignored and some should cause the frame to be
dropped if they are non-zero and the receiving Rbridge does not know
that they means. Of course, I'm only talking about what the
specification would say about unallocated bits. We may, in completing
the specification, give a specific meaning of some of those bits
currently labeled as reserved in which case we can say what we like
about their setting on transmission and interpretation on receipt and
the generic language would only apply to remaining reserved bits.

(3) Also, if versions are going to actually be useful in an incremental
deployment scenario, I think it would be useful for Rbridges to know
what version is supported by another RBridge they are talking to. This
could be easily accomplished by adding that information to the core link
state.

Thanks,
Donald