Update on status of eui-64 in IB

Daniel Cassiday <[email protected]> Mon, 09 Aug 2004 17:28:42 -0400
Newsgroups gmane.ietf.ipoib
Message-ID <[email protected]>
A while back it was pointed out that the IB specification was unclear on
how to set the universal/local bit in the EUI-64. This was causing a 
problem in the ipoverib wg on how to generate an interface identifier 
from this EUI-64.

The IBTA has looked into this and planning is to modify the IB spec to 
clarify that the universal/local bit should be cleared when defining the 
EUI-64.  The spec with this modification is currently under internal 
review. Pending approval (which is expected) the clarification will be 
included in the upcoming 1.2 release of the spec.

This means that the IBA will conform to the IEEE definition of
universal/local bit, and that for ipoverib, interface identifiers should
be generated from the EUI-64 as per RFC 2373 (i.e. the universal/local
bit should be inverted).

(Note, at one point the IBTA Link WG considered using a special value in 
the OUI field (i.e. this is where the vendor id appears) to indicate 
local scope but this was discarded in favor of the simplier fix defined 
above.)