Philip Homburg wrote:
It should be clear that an IPv4-only host only speaks IPv4. This means
that communication with an IPv4-only host has to be IPv4.
This did not have to be true, had there been an extension/option
standardized at the same time as IPv6 for IPv4 packets to be gateway'd
into IPv6 transparently and efficiently (thru any dual stacked
host/router), than at this point we would have likely been looking at 4
classes of nodes
- IPv4 only, legacy, requires translation to communicate directly with ipv6
- IPv4 only, extended, just needs a gateway to communicate directly with
IPv6
- Dual Stack
- IPv6 only
Such additional functionality, could have been organically updated into
most major OS's without any required network topology changes.
Joe
