Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/960913/

What is IP fragmentation, why is it important, and do people understand
it? The answer to that last question is “not as well as they think”. This
article will also answer the rest of those
questions and introduce fragquiz, a game that I
wrote to allow players to guess how IP packets will behave when they are
too large for the network. As evidence that IP fragmentation is not
well-understood, a room full of networking experts played fragquiz and got
a score that was
nowhere close to perfect. In addition, I will describe a new algorithm for
fragmentation avoidance, which some colleagues and I
developed, that helped motivate development of fragquiz.