Slashdot Mirror
World's Smallest IPv6 Stack By Cisco, Atmel, SICS
B Rog writes "Cisco, Atmel, and the Swedish Institute of Computer Science have released uIPv6, the world's smallest IPv6 compliant IPv6 stack, as open source for the Contiki embedded operating system. The intent is to bring IP addresses to the masses by giving devices such as thermometers or lightbulbs an IPv6 stack. With a code size of 11 kilobytes and a dynamic memory usage of less than 2 kilobytes (yes, kilobytes!), it certainly fits the bill of the ultra-low-power microcontrollers typically used in such devices. When every lightbulb has an IP address, the vast address range of IPv6 sounds like a pretty good idea."
At least on Slashdot, it would be nice if posters specified the OSI approved license as it tends to be import for different types of software.
The FAQ says it uses the 3-clause BSD license.
I personnaly like stuff like this to be BSD, while applications are GPL
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Making the IP stack smaller will not allow low power devices to harness the power of the Internet because while it lowers the bar for technically interacting on the Internet we can't do so safely with a device that can't also implement sane security.
If a light fixture can't execute a secure authentication mechanism to determine whether it really should be turned off/on then it really shouldn't be taking those controls (or reporting its status) to IP queries. These requirements are already beyond the resources needed for less optimized IPv6 implementations this brings us back to Amdahl's law doesn't it... Don't optimize blindly.
With a code size of 11 kilobytes and a dynamic memory usage of less than 2 kilobytes (yes, kilobytes!)
I'm left wondering whether the submitter thinks this is impressively small or impressively large. Perhaps I'm getting old, but to me 11 kilobytes seems rather large. I might be impressed by someone squeezing a stack into, say, 301 bytes, but surely you can implement *anything* in 11 kilobytes.
And in fact, the Wikipedia page for Contiki links to a web server running on a C64! Shall we see if we can Slashdot it?
Whenever I trash MS-DOS 1.0 on Slashdot, I get a contradictions ("arguments" presumes too much actual knowledge) from people who insist that it's the best OS that could have been implemented on the hardware available in 1981. The counterexamples I usually answer are things like CP/M (the leader before commodity PCs took over), QNX (now sold as an embedded OS, but originally meant as a desktop system), and CTOS (utterly dead now, but my favorite at one time) that all had more power and lower hardware requirements. These examples go right by people because they've never heard of these OSs. (Except maybe CP/M, and then they assume that it's the same level as MS-DOS 1.0, because 1.0 was based on QDOS, and QDOS pretended to be a CP/M clone.) I'm very pleased to learn about Contiki, even though I'll probably never work with it, since it's a prime example that you can even do high-powered OSs with GUIs on 80s-era hardware.