All things related to multicast

[Bill Owens <>]

On Sat, May 20, 2006 at 05:21:11PM -0700, Tim Stevenson wrote:
> 
> At 11:31 AM 5/20/2006, Marshall Eubanks exclaimed:
> 
> >>FYI, Cisco Cat6500 supports IPv6 multicast routing & MLD. It also
> >>supports MLD snooping in the hardware, but only for MLDv2. This
> >>requires PFC3 (sup32 or sup720).
> >
> >Since MLD2 maps to IGMP3, I think that that's good.
>
> Yes, but my (admittedly limited) understanding has been that MLDv1 is 
> more widely available in host stacks at this stage, though v2 is 
> making inroads.
> 
> Tim

That's right; all the major desktop and server OSes do MLDv1, only Linux does 
MLDv2. Windows Vista will have v2 when it is released (whenever that is - I 
don't keep track). OSX should get it once FreeBSD has it, but there are IPR 
issues that ironically relate to an Apple patent. The last I'd heard, folks 
had concluded that the IPR claim would not apply to a host implementation, 
only (possibly) for a router, and they were stripping out just the host parts 
of the code to include in FreeBSD. But I haven't heard of any progress in a 
couple of months. BTW, that's why FreeBSD and OSX don't have IGMPv3 either.

Oh, and Juniper's MLDv2 implementation (router, not snooper) is incompatible 
with the way the Linux implementation works. Not usually an issue since few 
folks have hosts directly connected to Juniper ports, but it bit us once.

Bill.