GoKawiilShow HN: We implemented the IPv8 Internet-Draft in the Linux Kernel, Musl Libc, and BGP
The Hook: Why We Built This
A few weeks ago, an Internet-Draft titled Internet Protocol Version 8 (IPv8) — draft-thain-ipv8-02 caught our eye.
The draft makes some extraordinary claims:
Zero Address Exhaustion : Every ASN holder automatically receives 4,294,967,296 host addresses ($2^{32}$).
: Every ASN holder automatically receives ($2^{32}$). 100% Backward Compatibility : "IPv4 is a proper subset of IPv8... There is no flag day and no forced migration."
: "IPv4 is a proper subset of IPv8... There is no flag day and no forced migration." Total Network Management: Every packet is validated against DNS8 and WHOIS8; all elements are authorized via OAuth2 JWT tokens; and all core services (DHCP, DNS, NTP, Syslog, WHOIS, NAT, ACLs) are bundled into a single "Zone Server".
Most network engineers would laugh this off as an April Fools RFC written by an enterprise architect on buzzword overdrive. But instead of just arguing on mailing lists, the team at goonhost.rocks decided to actually build the entire specification from scratch and test what happens when you deploy it across a distributed multi-AS network.
What We Built (Open Source Repositories)
We implemented the complete IPv8 stack from ring-0 kernel code up to user-space applications:
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