Respectfully, that is deployment dependent. In a traditional SP topology that 
focuses on large do everything boxes, where the topology is fairly 
point-to-point and you only have a small handful of nodes at a PoP, labels can 
be fast, cheap and easy. Given the lack of ECMP/WECMP, they remain fairly 
efficient within the hardware.

However if you move away from large multi-chip systems, which hide internal 
links which can only be debugged and monitored if you know the the obscure, 
often different ways in which they are partially exposed to the operator, and 
to a system of fixed form-factor, single chip systems, labels fall apart at 
scale with high ECMP. Needing to enumerate every possible path within the 
network or having to have a super-deep label stack removes all of the perceived 
benefits of cheap and simple. The arguments about IP lookups being slow is one 
best left to the 1990's when it was true. Fixed pipeline systems have proven 
this to be false.

And if the argument is coming down to the lookup delay between the two and your 
talking about the WAN, speed of light is dominate so the ns differences are in 
the noise, baring the monetary exchanges.

Your follow on statement about more ports and smaller silicon is in abstract 
somewhat correct but is practice not. Across the silicon manufactures no one in 
the open market is making a purely MPLS capable chip. With the cost of chips 
today, you must have multiple customers for the silicon, or, if you are using 
wholly internally, have enough volume to justify the $100M's that it costs to 
make. So everyone is optimizing around re-use and maximal customer overlap for 
execution. So they all do MPLS and IP and SR and IPIP and ... making the 
argument moot.

But please to not take this as saying SRv6 is great. The community got v6 wrong 
in a number of areas and SR is not helping that. v4 as a transport vs. MPLS is 
a useful conversation to be had, again depending on deployment and philosophy 
around large vs. small network nodes.

David

> On Jun 10, 2020, at 9:51 PM, Saku Ytti <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 11 Jun 2020 at 00:48, Mark Tinka <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
>> On 10/Jun/20 21:36, Phil Bedard wrote:
>>> In its simplest form without TE paths, there isn't much to SRv6.  You use a 
>>> v6 address as an endpoint and a portion of the address to specify a 
>>> specific VPN service.  You completely eliminate the label distribution 
>>> protocol.
>> 
>> A BGPv6-free core is a decent use-case for us.
> 
> 100% Eliminating label forwarding in core is not an asset, it is a
> liability. Label forwarding is fast, cheap and simple[0]. You can do
> it with on-chip memory in constant time. IP lookups are slow,
> expensive and complex[0]. SRv6 marketing is false, bordering dishonest
> marketing of an unclean abomination of a protocol. Every HW designer
> has sighed in relief when I've said I don't care about it, because
> it's also very HW unfriendly, like IPv6 generally. Unfortunately SRv6
> is somewhat easy to market with the whole 'it's simple, just IP'
> spiel.
> 
> [0] None of this is hard to measure, it is a known fact. And all of it
> matters, you can measure lower jitter for MPLS than IP, you can better
> carry DDoS traffic when using MPLS compared to IP and you can have
> more ports in front-plate for the same money, by spending external
> memory SERDES for WAN ports.
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
>  ++ytti
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