[ipxe-devel] Enable NET_PROTO_IPV6 by default [in UEFI builds]?

[Tore Anderson]

It's late 2015 and BCP 177 (RFC 6540) tells us that everything that
supports "IP" should also support IPv6. iPXE by default does not.

I'd therefore like to suggest enabling NET_PROTO_IPV6 by default. This
would help prevent situations where distributions (like Linux
distributions) ship iPXE with IPv6 support disabled because they just
follow the upstream default (case in point:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1280318). This in turn
makes supporting IPv6 more cumbersome for a user than it really ought
to be, because the sysadmin will need to jump through extra hoops to
make it all work.

That said, I was told on IRC that the enabling IPv6 support by default
might prove difficult due to space constraints. Assuming that turns out
to be the case, I'd nevertheless propose enabling it by default for UEFI
builds specifically. As I understand it, space is less limited in UEFI.
Another thing worth mentioning is that UEFI has specified IPv6 PXE for
more than five years now (since version 2.3D to be specific).

Thanks for considering!

Tore