Pascal ANELLI

IPv6

Linux IPv6-DRET Homepage

IPv6-DRET is a public implementation of the next generation Internet Protocol, IPv6, funded by the DGA/DRET (French Military Research Agency) and co-developped by co-developped by INRIA Sophia-Antipolis and LIP 6 Paris.

IPv6-DRET can operate IPv6 hosts as well as IPv6 routers. It comes with an implementation of the RIPng routing protocole within GateD, tested to operate over IPv6/IPv4 tunnels.

This page presents the current version. The first version of IPv6-DRET homepage is still available at INRIA, but it is not maintained now

What is IPv6 ?

IPv6 is the new version of the Internet Protocol. It should replace progressively the current IPv4 routing protocol which is responsible for interconnecting the gateways of the thousands of networks across the worldwide Internet.

IPv6 was primarily designed to extend the current address space which has become too small to accomodate the increasing growth of the network. IPv6 addresses are 128-bit long, thus multiplying the potential Internet size by a factor of 2⁹⁶. This allows for different addressing schemes, new types of applications, etc...

IPv6 specifications have also been tuned to support the following:

Plug-and-play configuration
Efficient packet handling/routing
End-to-end flow identification for integrated service
Standard security mechanisms
Mobility
Smooth IPv4-to-IPv6 transition.

While native IPv6 stacks and native IPv4 stacks will not be able to interoperate directly, IPv4-compatibility mechanisms have been introduced in IPv6 to ensure a smooth transition, i.e. allow isolated IPv6 islands to communicate via the IPv4 internet through "tunnels"

A complete description can be found in the book of C.HUITEMA: IPv6: The New Internet Protocol, Edition 2, Prentice Hall, 1998 . An another good book exists, it is written in french: "IPv6: théorie et pratique" by G. Cisault, Ed. O'Reilly, 1998 . You can find in this book how to install IPv6 on various OS.

Many other sources of informations related at IPv6 are available on net. The main links are here.

IPv6-DRET's Features

IPv6-DRET has been implemented inside the Linux operating system. The current release is based on kernel 2.1.23. Regular upgrades will keep up with the ever growing contribution to the Linux system.

Since routing issues are among the most important research interests concerning IPv6, our network stack is intended to accomodate both host and router IPv6 machines. Routing neighbor discovery daemons insure that host and routers on a same link are communicating properly to exchange parameters, set default routes, etc...

Besides implementing the router specification of the IPv6 protocol, a great deal of effort was also put into the developpement of RIPng into GateD.

As of today, the IPv6-DRET implementation makes it possible to start studying issues such as the impact of IPv6 mechanisms on multimedia applications transmission for example.

Current IPv6-DRET features

IPv6 addressing
Loopback, (multiple) ethernet interfaces
IPv6 raw protocol
ICMPv6 including error and ND messages
Neighbor discovery
UDP and TCP over IPv6
Simple Interface Transition device
IPv6 BSD API including most of R.Stevens' advanced APIs.
IPv6 router
Simple IPv6 forwarding
Use of router advertisements
Path MTU discovery and fragmentation
Flow label management

Applications available

Applications currently available are :

network configuration (ifconfig, route)
debugging tools (ping,traceroute)
remote terminal (telnet)
file transfert (ftp)
Routing table management (gated)

Basically, ifconfig allows to configure IPv6 interface addresses for the loopback, SIT and Ethernet devices. By configuring, we mean add, delete addresses, set flags, etc... It can also be used to setup configured tunnels to remote IPv4/IPv6 routers across the IPv4 internet. section.

Route is used to configure IPv4 and IPv6 routes: add, delete routes, set flags, lookup the routing table, etc...
Actually, the use of the above tools is not really required for IPv6-DRET hosts when they are running the ndpd-host daemon and routers are running the ndpd-router daemon.

Ping is a useful tool to check if the route between two hosts of the Internet is up. Besides, it provides statistics such as the round-trip time, time-to-live, ... Traceroute, as its name indicates, traces the route between two hosts and reports the routers messages go through to reach a given machine.

RIPng is a package for dynamic management of routing tables in an IPv6 networking environment. For instance, most of today's routes across the 6Bone are maintained manually. While this is possible with few nodes in the network, the 6Bone will soon become unmanagable this way. Several tunnels are now added daily!

RIPng is among the "simplest" routing protocols available and therefore will be used in first place in the 6Bone. Companies or consortium such as cisco or Merit already use RIPng message to maintain their IPv6 routing tables.

The protocol relies on a "Distance Vector" algorithm. Its simplicity comes from the fact that it does not require any global knowledge of the network. Only local messages are exchanged with neighboring routers.

It is currently implemented into GateD, a routing daemon maintained by Merit consortium.

Source Code

IPv6_DRET_1.0 is available here
Patch for Gated is also available here

Easy to Install

A quick guide describes the main actions to install and to configure the stack.
A french version is also available in postscipt.

Documentation

The main kernel features about IPv6 are given here.
A documentation of the IPv6 code is partially available in postscript. This document is not completed but some ticks are given.
A documentation (partially in english) of Linux Networking Hackers'Guide is avalaible in postscript. This documentation explains how IP is implemented into Linux. Some works is still needed.

LIP6 Testbed

LIP6 testbed is connected with 6-BONE via G6-BONE.
The final project is described in this page.

Others Related Links

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