Summary

  • ILNP separates a node’s identifier from its network locator while keeping IPv6 on the wire and leaving routers and switches unchanged.
  • Saleem Bhatti’s four-interface TCP demonstration used a 15 cm patch lead in a hackathon room; BSD/Linux distribution support is the adoption test he and the audience named.

The punchline in Saleem Bhatti’s RIPE 93 demonstration was a cable. At the IETF 126 hackathon, a client in the meeting room sent a TCP flow to a server in Bhatti’s St Andrews lab. The team brought up four interfaces one by one; their four prefixes came from a single /60 for convenience. Bhatti described the path diversity inside the room as a 15 cm patch lead between a router and switch. The test established dynamic locator binding across four interfaces in one lab setup; it supplied no performance measurements across independent networks.

ILNP changes what an IP address means. In ordinary IP, one address identifies a node and tells the network where to send packets. ILNP splits those jobs into a Node Identifier and a Locator. The transport flow keeps the identifier; locators can be bound dynamically to active interfaces. Each value is 64 bits in the IPv6 implementation.

The routing core can stay put. Bhatti said the test required no change to routers or switches. The endpoint carried the work: the team changed the FreeBSD network stack and part of the transport layer, modified libc’s getaddrinfo path, and added DNS support for ILNP records. Existing IPv6 applications could run without recompilation because the modified system library presented them with the address form they expected. RFC 6742 defines optional DNS records for the protocol.

That is a useful engineering trade: avoid a network-wide equipment upgrade, then ask operating-system maintainers and resolver software to carry new behavior. Jim Reid made the distribution problem explicit in the Q&A: users are unlikely to patch their own kernels one by one. Bhatti agreed that he wants ILNP in BSD and Linux and wants more people to test it.

The project has running code. Its University of St Andrews site lists FreeBSD 14.3 binaries and a Linux prototype based on kernel 4.9. The site does not establish that either implementation ships through a mainstream operating-system distribution. An upstream package or an operator pilot would change that adoption assessment.

ILNP’s specification also remains research work: RFC 6740 is an Experimental RFC published on the IRTF stream, with no formal standing in the IETF standards process. The four-path cable test answers one question—can endpoints switch locators while ordinary IPv6 infrastructure forwards the packets? The next answer depends on whether system software makes that capability routine to install and debug.

Sources: RIPE 93 session transcript; RIPE talk details; RFC 6740; RFC 6741 engineering considerations; RFC 6742; University of St Andrews ILNP project.