Goonhost.rocks Implements IPv8 Internet-Draft in Linux Kernel, Musl Libc, and BGP

IPv8 Internet-Draft Implementation

Goonhost.rocks announced the completion of a full implementation of the IPv8 Internet-Draft (draft-thain-ipv8-02). The project involved building the entire specification from scratch to test its deployment across a distributed multi-AS network. This effort addresses claims made in the draft regarding zero address exhaustion and 100% backward compatibility with IPv4.

Technical Components Developed

The implementation spans multiple layers of the networking stack. In the Linux Kernel 6.6, native AF_INET8 support was added, including TCP8, UDP8, and RAW8, along with 28-byte IPv8 header parsing and 64-bit routing table lookups. Musl Libc was updated to include sockaddr_in8, inet_pton8, inet_ntop8, getaddrinfo(), and getnameinfo() for IPv8 addresses. Additionally, iproute2 received native ip -8 route and ip -8 addr management commands.

Network Services and Applications

Further development included a BGP8 daemon with Multi-Protocol Extensions for exchanging IPv8 routes within FRRouting. An IPv8 Zone Server Platform was created in Go, implementing all 10 RFC sub-protocols such as DHCP8, DNS8, SNTP, NetLog8, OAuth8 JWT server, WHOIS8, ACL8, and XLATE8 stateful NAT. Nginx and cURL were also modified to serve and request HTTP over 64-bit IPv8 endpoints.

Testbed Environment

The entire system was deployed and tested on a 10-Node QEMU Multi-AS Testbed. This testbed comprised four Autonomous Systems (AS 64496, AS 64497, AS 64498, AS 64499) connected across multicast WAN/LAN segments, loaded with 11 virtual machines to simulate a real-world network environment.