[rachelbythebay]

Consider what happens if your machine has another IP address somehow (a so-called "primary"), and then you add all of the "additional IPs" as /32s. Bingo, you can now use all of them.

The rest of the network doesn't care what they look like at certain scopes. Those devices just know to route it to the next hop, and when that next-hop is your box with a bunch of interfaces/aliases/whatever configured, it'll just handle it.

Try it, you'll like it.

(Edit: IPv4 here, hence /32. No such foolery needed with v6.)

[ArchOversight]

Yes, absolutely. Unfortunately there's still some wastage as you end up having to set up a public IP for both endpoints to allow the routing to be public. (Yes, you can use private IP's for routing, but it makes diagnosing issues much more difficult). So then you end up with /30's used for point to point links, which is 4 addresses.

You can use /31's for point to point if both devices support it, but it's still hit or miss whether they do or not.

Even when getting a block of IP's from providers to a customer edge (think ISP's like Comcast or others) they tend to require using the .1 as the gateway, and the others are considered on-link and thus there is a network/broadcast address.

Your suggestion doesn't allow direct L2 communication between machines without sending traffic to the router, even if the two systems are L2 adjacent.

Even with v6 you'd want to assign multiple IP's to the same interface, except that instead of getting /128's routed to a machine you just a get a single /64 and you can use any of the addresses out of that range.