Re: [PATCH net-next 00/14] gtp: Additional feature support

Hi Harald,

On 20/09/17 01:19, Harald Welte wrote:

Hi Tom,

On Tue, Sep 19, 2017 at 08:59:28AM -0700, Tom Herbert wrote:

quoted

On Tue, Sep 19, 2017 at 5:43 AM, Harald Welte [off-list ref]
wrote:

quoted

On Mon, Sep 18, 2017 at 05:38:50PM -0700, Tom Herbert wrote:

quoted

   - IPv6 support

see my detailed comments in other mails.  It's unfortunately only
support for the already "deprecated" IPv6-only PDP contexts, not the
more modern v4v6 type.  In order to interoperate with old and new
approach, all three cases (v4, v6 and v4v6) should be supported from
one code base.

It sounds like something that can be subsequently added.

Not entirely, at least on the netlink (and any other configuration
interface) you will have to reflect this from the very beginning.  You
have to have an explicit PDP type and cannot rely on the address type to
specify the type of PDP context.  Whatever interfaces are introduced
now will have to remain compatible to any future change.

My strategy to avoid any such possible 'road blocks' from being
introduced would be to simply add v4v6 and v6 support in one go.  The
differences are marginal (having both an IPv6 prefix and a v4 address in
parallel, rather than mutually exclusive only).

quoted

Do you have a reference to the spec?

See http://osmocom.org/issues/2418#note-7 which lists Section 11.2.1.3.2
of 3GPP TS 29.061 in combination with RFC3314, RFC7066, RFC6459 and
3GPP TS 23.060 9.2.1 as well as a summary of my understanding of it some
months ago.

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   - Configurable networking interfaces so that GTP kernel can be
   used and tested without needing GSN network emulation (i.e. no
   user space daemon needed).

We have some pretty decent userspace utilities for configuring the
GTP interfaces and tunnels in the libgtpnl repository, but if it
helps people to have another way of configuration, I won't be
against it.

AFAIK those userspace utilities don't support IPv6.

Of course not [yet]. libgtpnl and the command line tools have been
implemented specifically for the in-kernel GTP driver, and you have to
make sure to add related support on both the kernel and the userspace
side (libgtpnl). So there's little point in adding features on either
side before the other side.  There would be no way to test...

quoted

Being able to configure GTP like any other encapsulation will
facilitate development of IPv6 and other features.

That may very well be the case, but adding "IPv6 support" to kernel GTP
in a way that is not in line with the existing userspace libraries and
control-plane implementations means that you're developing those
features in an artificial environment that doesn't resemble real 3GPP
interoperable networks out there.

As indicated, I'm not against adding additional interfaces, but we have
to make sure that we add IPv6 support (or any new feature support) to at
least libgtpnl, and to make sure we test interoperability with existing
3GPP network equipment such as real IPv6 capable phones and SGSNs.

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I'm not sure if this is a useful feature.  GTP is used only in
operator-controlled networks and only on standard ports.  It's not
possible to negotiate any non-standard ports on the signaling plane
either.

Bear in mind that we're not required to do everything the GTP spec
says.

Yes, we are, at least as long as it affects interoperability with other
implemetations out there.

GTP uses well-known port numbers on *both* sides of the tunnel, and you
cannot deviate from that.

Actually, the well-known port is only mandatory for the receiving side.
The sending side can choose any port it wishes as long as it is prepared
to receive possible error indication on the well-known port.

Of course, it makes the implementation simple to use only one port, but 
for scalability it might be a good idea to support per PDP context 
sending ports.

Regards
Andreas

There's no point in having all kinds of feetures in the GTP user plane
which are not interoperable with other implementations, and which are
completely outside of the information model / architecture of GTP.

In the real world, GTP-U is only used in combination with GTP-C.  And in
GTP-C you can only negotiate the IP address of both sides of GTP-U, and
not the port number information.  As a result, the port numbers are
static on both sides.

quoted

My impression is GTP designers probably didn't think in terms of
getting best performance. But we can ;-)

I think it's wasted efforts if it's about "random udp ports" as no
standards-compliant implementation out there with which you will have to
interoperate will be able to support it.

GTP is used between home and roaming operator.  If you want to introduce
changes to how it works, you will have to have control over both sides
of the implementation of both the GTP-C and the GTP-u plane, which is
very unlikely and rather the exception in the hundreds of operators you
interoperate with.  Also keep in mind that there often are various
"middleboxes" that will suddenly have to reflect your changes.  That
starts from packet filters at various locations in the operator networks
and/or roaming hubs, down to GTP hubs and others.

My opinion is: Non-standard GTP ports are not going to happen.

quoted

I also brought up open_ggsn. ggsn to sgsn.

That's good to hear.  For both v4 and v6 PDP contexts?  Whcih phones
did you use for testing?  Particularly given how convolved the address
allocation is (see below), I'm surprised it would work.

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For IPv6 (and v4v6) PDP contexts there is quite a bit of extra headache
related to the way how router solicitation/advertisements are modified
in the 3GPP world.

The address allocation in v4 is simple:
* MS/UE requests dynamic or fixed IPv4 address via EUA IE of PDP context
   activation
* GGSN responds with IPv4 address in EUA of Activate PDP context
   response (and then uses netlink to tell the kernel about that
   IPv4 address)

In v6 or the v6 portion of v4v6 it works differently:
* MS/UE requests dynamic or fixed IPv4 address in EUA IE of PDP context
   activation
* GGSN responds with an IPv6 address, but that address is *not* used
   for communication, but simply used as an "interface identifier" to
   build a link-local address.
* MS then uses router solicitation using that link-local address
* GGSN responds with router advertisement, allocating a single /64
   prefix, from which the MS then generates a fully-qualified IPv6
   source address for communication.

How did you envision this to be done with the v6 support you just added?
At the very least, the /64 prefix matching would have to be implemented
so that in fact all addresses within that /64 prefix are matched +
encapsulated for a given PDP context in the downlink (to phone)
direction.

[...]

I would hope all the above you're describing is mostly control plane
matters.

It is not.  The control plane is GTP-C and runs on different UDP ports
(at least for GTPv1/v2).  The user plane is GTP-U and is what's done in
the kernel.  And by its very nature, IPv6 router
solicitations/advertisements (as well as neighbor
solicitations/advertisements) are part of the user plane and thus
handled in GTP-U.

quoted

At least a good design decouples data palne and control
plane. I know that GTP is a bit convoluted in this regard.

The problem is that IPv6 has never been specified properly for
point-to-point links.  There's no decent PPP specs for IPv6.  So the
3GPP folks had to try to be as close as possible to the existing
(broadcast) link layer model to facilitate existing IPv6 implemetations
to work over 3GPP bearers.  That's why they kept whatever possible to
re-use in terms of neighbor/router discovery.

So the problem is now: Unless you handle GTP-U *entirely* in the kernel
(including router + neighbor advertisement/solicitation), you will have
a "split GTP-U" plane between kernel and userspace.  And in that context
the question is who owns the sequence numbers, how will you avoid race
conditions, ... - my simple suggestion is thus to keep with the current
split and do everything GTP-U related inside the kernel and everything
GTP-C related in userspace.

I think there has to be a clear plan/architecture on how to implement
those bits in terms of the kernel/userspace split, and at least a proof
of concept implementation that we can show works with some real phones
out there - otherwise there's no point in having IPv6 support that works
well with some custom tools.

Regards,
	Harald