alt Hacker Newsipv6 packet does not have any port field. ports are on the level of tcp and udp, and you don't have to use tcp or udp on top of ipv6. ipv4 packet does not have any port information as well.
Replies
magicalhippo • today at 8:07 AM
> ipv6 packet does not have any port field
Yes, that's why I said I know it was mixing of layers.
However ports are a layer violation in a strict sense, introduced as a workaround because there was no easy way to just add thousands of new IPs to a single host back in the IPv4 days. No need to continue a workaround that causes grief on a daily basis.
tcp6 is a thing though, was created at the same time as ipv6, and it does have ports, along with udp6. But if you really want one ip per stream and just hardwire port 1 or something, it's not like IPv6 does anything to stand in the way of that. Mght have performance issues on some OS's binding thousands of IPs to one interface, but that's on them to fix. Bigger lift would be the APIs that would need to change to manage whole prefixes at a time instead of single IPs.