link-local

Ease out your IPv6 gateway!

Anurag Bhatia
One of very cool features of IPv6 is link-local address which stays local to a given link. For this fe80::/10 is reserved. A /10 is a huge amount of address space in IPv6 (and in IPv4 too :) ). This means from fe80:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000 to febf:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff. Since by design link-local address stays local, the address configured on the upstream/gateway router can be kept same for ease of use and comfort. This wasn’t the case of IPv4 where each VLAN/layer 2 domain had it’s own gateway.