Subject: [ipfix-info] Using Field Type 0 for Padding?

From: Jeroen Massar <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 01 Sep 2004 11:30:49 +0200

Hi,

Currently draft-ietf-ipfix-info-04.txt doesn't specify any
"Field Type 0". Due to the fact that padding is mandatory would it make
sense to make Field Type 0 the 'padding' field ?

This way one could make every PDU a fixed length eg by letting the
template consist of:

field		type	bytes
IPV4_SRC_ADDR	8	4
TOS		5	1
PADDING		0	3

This would thus align all the PDU's at 8 bytes, thus a multiple of
8/16/32/64 bits making quite some architectures happy.
It does cost 3 bytes per PDU, but this overcomes alignment and thus
allows one to prepare the PDU's in memory according to the alignment
rules of the architecture.

Another advantage would be that parsers don't have to watch alignment
and that a FlowSet is automatically aligned correctly too.

Greets,
 Jeroen