New Linksys CPE, IPv6 ?

[jfbeam at gmail.com (Ricky Beam)]

On Wed, 31 Mar 2010 16:53:37 -0400, Michael Holstein  
<michael.holstein at csuohio.edu> wrote:
> If this is a strictly "hardware" discussion, v6 "works" on a variety of
> models, albeit not with stock firmware.
...
> This suggests that Cisco (et.al.) can release an "official" firmware
> image to support v6 on existing devices whenever they're sufficiently
> motivated to do so.

Yes and no.  Many of the uber-cheap models simply don't have the  
processing power or memory to do IPv6 well. (Some would say they don't do  
IPv4 well.  I'm one of them.)  Pure here's-a-packet-here's-where-it-goes  
switching can be done in almost any model as long as the v6 stack doesn't  
make the image too large to fit in the 4K rom.  Doing anything remotely  
complicated, like tunneling and stateful firewalling, makes the image much  
too large and eats way too much ram.  (This is also way many of the cheap  
models do not run linux and generally cannot run a usable linux image.) On  
the more expensive, higher end models, yes, they can run rather complex  
IPv4/6 stacks quite well.  However, the bottom is that there is simply  
little to no consumer demand for IPv6 support -- esp. in North America  
(read: US) where most of these things are sold.

--Ricky