4 ms·

Show HN: We Implemented the IPv8 Internet-Draft in Linux, Libc, and BGP

73 points by turborigby 2mo ago

turborigby 2mo ago
Hey HN, A few weeks ago, the "Internet Protocol Version 8 (IPv8)" Internet-Draft (draft-thain-ipv8-02) caught our eye. The draft proposes replacing IPv4/IPv6 with a 64-bit hierarchical structure (ASN.Host), giving every 32-bit ASN holder 4.3 billion host addresses and consolidating DHCP, DNS, NTP, Syslog, OAuth, and WHOIS into a unified "Zone Server". Instead of just debating the theoretical viability on mailing lists, our team at goonhost.rocks decided to implement the entire specification from scratch to see what happens when you deploy it across a distributed multi-AS network. What we built: - Linux Kernel 6.6: Native AF_INET8 (family 46) socket layer, 28-byte packet routing, and sysctl boundary filters. https://gitlab.turborigby.xyz/goonhost-experiments/linux https://gitlab.turborigby.xyz/goonhost-experiments/linux - Musl Libc: sockaddr_in8, inet_pton8, getaddrinfo() resolver support. https://gitlab.turborigby.xyz/goonhost-experiments/musl https://gitlab.turborigby.xyz/goonhost-experiments/musl - iproute2: Native `ip -8 route` and `ip -8 addr` CLI tooling. https://gitlab.turborigby.xyz/goonhost-experiments/iproute2 https://gitlab.turborigby.xyz/goonhost-experiments/iproute2 - FRRouting: BGP8 daemon with Multi-Protocol Extensions (AFI/SAFI). https://gitlab.turborigby.xyz/goonhost-experiments/frrouting https://gitlab.turborigby.xyz/goonhost-experiments/frrouting - IPv8 Zone Server (Go): 10-protocol platform (DHCP8, DNS8 TYPE_A8 88, SNTP, NetLog8, OAuth8, WHOIS8, XLATE8). https://gitlab.turborigby.xyz/goonhost-experiments/zoneserver https://gitlab.turborigby.xyz/goonhost-experiments/zoneserve... - Nginx & cURL: Patched for 64-bit IPv8 HTTP traffic. https://gitlab.turborigby.xyz/goonhost-experiments/nginx https://gitlab.turborigby.xyz/goonhost-experiments/nginx https://gitlab.turborigby.xyz/goonhost-experiments/curl https://gitlab.turborigby.xyz/goonhost-experiments/curl We set up a 10-node QEMU multi-AS testbed across 4 Autonomous Systems, pushed 112,000+ active routes into the kernel FIB, and ran continuous traffic generation. While it works smoothly in an isolated lab, our report highlights several fundamental real-world failure modes: 1. PMTU & Silent MSS Blackholing (28-byte IP header breaks 1500-byte MTU paths without 1452-byte MSS clamping). 2. Asymmetric uRPF / BCP 38 drops on multi-homed ASNs. 3. Legacy DC switch ASIC/TCAM incompatibility (EtherType 0x88B8 punts to CPU exception path). 4. Monolithic Zone Server DDoS blast radius. 5. Systemic economic crises: RIR funding model collapse (90% revenue drop) and global BGP DFZ table explosion (3M–5M+ routes). Full research report: https://cdnnn.goonhost.rocks/IPV8_RESEARCH_REPORT.md https://cdnnn.goonhost.rocks/IPV8_RESEARCH_REPORT.md
- ameliaquining 2mo ago
  Your Markdown-format research report is full of mojibake, you might want to fix that.
  - lschueller 2mo ago
    Seems to be a 404 now.
  - turborigby 2mo ago
    Fixed the Content-Type header on R2 CDN, the UTF-8 box-drawing diagrams should render cleanly now. Thanks for pointing it out!
wbsun 2mo ago
isn't any ipv6+ supposed to use any string address and no DNS is required at all? :D
nairboon 2mo ago
Where is IPv7?
- xp84 2mo ago
  I have that RFC on my iPhone 9
- hk1337 2mo ago
  It's like how we skipped from Windows 95 to Windows 98
  - itintheory 2mo ago
    I think those were release years. More like how we went from Windows 8 to 10. (I understand that the real reason here is either a) OSX went to version 10, so don't want to be behind, or b) many systems would pattern match on windows version 9*" so Windows 9 would be treated as 95/98.)
    - WorldMaker 2mo ago
      Examples of B were found in open source, including some versions of the OpenJDK. Mac OS was said to skip 9 on the way to 10 due to a combo of some Asian numerology (just as Western numerology often encourages skipping "unlucky" 13) and also trying to make a clean break more obvious between System 8 and OSX. (The X being the 10, as Apple's favorite way to write 10 for various reasons. Which is why "OSX" was always a misnomer, accidentally burning the version number into the operating system name. Part of why Apple has been trying to get everyone on the "macOS" brand lately to pull the version number back out.)
      - wmf 2mo ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_9
      - kstrauser 2mo ago
        Uh, Mac OS 9 existed. It shipped with early iMacs before OS X was stable and for people who needed to run old apps natively.
ahmetozer 2mo ago
Thanks for testing, in year 2026, still IPv6 is not fully well utilized homes, corporates especially it is worse at clouds (AWS, GCP) if you not limit north to south, they are not good for east-to-west compared to telco providers. For example, GCP uses IP forwarding for IPv6 real IP address is not allocated at machine. At some of the components which is EKS is not support every case at IPv6. So IPv8 can be available around year 2300 I guess :) (i have not inspected v8 RFC yet)
- clhodapp 2mo ago
  IPv8 is just a reactionary response to IPv6 not being "IPv4 with larger addresses" like people who know IPv4 well would prefer. There would be no reason to adopt it if IPv6 were adopted.
  - hdgvhicv 2mo ago
    Yet IPv6 hasn’t been adopted. For decades. Because it wasn’t implemented transparently at the OS. I can’t plug in to my ip6 only network and reach an ip4 address because end user OSes don’t implement clat transparently, even today in 2026, let alone 20 years ago.
    - adw 2mo ago
      > Yet IPv6 hasn’t been adopted. news to literally anyone on a mobile internet connection (which is most internet connections!)
      - alexpotato 2mo ago
        I learned recently that France IPv6 adoption is also very high.
      - hdgvhicv 2mo ago
        I’m on 4g My v6 endpoint is unreachable. My v4 one is fine.
      - ahmetozer 2mo ago
TD-Linux 2mo ago
There is no "IPv8". Any crackpot can submit an internet-draft to the IETF, and this person happened to call theirs IPv8. If the submitter actually read the draft rather than feeding it to the slop cannon, they would have realized it is also a LLM hallucination that someone uploaded to IETF.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- stackghost 2mo ago
  OpenPGP key servers are an internet draft, if memory serves. I guess they don't exist either.
  - ameliaquining 2mo ago
    In fairness, they exist by virtue of having working implementations that (at least a few) people actually use, not by virtue of being an Internet-Draft.
  - TD-Linux 2mo ago
    It is not an individual I-D, but has been adopted by a working group, and has a chance of actually being published as a RFC.
  - Magicrafter13 2mo ago
    they are disgustingly slow so maybe we need a new draft...
  - brohee 2mo ago
    SCEP was (and still is) a very deployed protocol yet took 20 years for the draft to be published...
- ameliaquining 2mo ago
  I am fairly sure the authors do understand this (see: "Most network engineers would laugh this off as an April Fools RFC written by an enterprise architect on buzzword overdrive."). But since the proposal got a lot of attention, responding to it is a public service. And delegating this to an LLM arguably provides an accurate signal as to how much human attention the original proposal deserved :-P
foo-bar-baz529 2mo ago
The whole site appears to be satire, based on the homepage. I think we can ignore this article of theirs as well.
- kstrauser 2mo ago
  What’s wrong with satire sites? If The Onion put in the work to try this, I’d still be interested in hearing about it.
  - foo-bar-baz529 2mo ago
    It’s true that satire is not always bad. But I dislike that they don’t make it obvious that this article is satire. It wastes people’s time who actually take it seriously (as we can see by the other HN comments). Or if it’s serious, then why is it on a satire site? They need to pick a lane and be clear about it.
    - kstrauser 2mo ago
      It wasn't clear to me that this was a satire article. It seemed like a reasonably serious experiment with a bad idea.
- turborigby 2mo ago
  Feel free to sign up and deploy a VM - we are a very real VPS host! Unlike boring corporate providers, we just actually have a sense of humor (or more accurately, the developer has overdosed on TikToks and brainrot reels). Satirical branding doesn't mean the bare-metal servers or the kernel code aren't real.
kstrauser 2mo ago
I appreciate this. IPv8 is a terrible, terrible idea, and it’s good to see someone actually built it out to prove the depths of its terribleness. Well done.
ameliaquining 2mo ago
Question for someone who knows more about this stuff than I do: Why don't the problems in the "economic collapse" section also apply to IPv6? Or do they, and we've only been saved by lack of adoption?
- wmf 2mo ago
  For one thing, RIRs are not businesses. If they have less work to do they can have less staff. Worst case they could receive government funding like in the old days.
  - ameliaquining 2mo ago
    Would they in fact have less work to do? Government funding might be the right answer, but it's not necessarily going to happen automatically; the concern (which applies in other domains besides this one) is disrupting the means by which a public good is currently funded, without having a replacement already lined up. Also there's a subsection about tier 1 networks and those are businesses.
citruscomputing 2mo ago
Did you implement it, or did Claude implement it?
- basscomm 2mo ago
  I'm pretty sure an AI wrote all or most of this article.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
Magicrafter13 2mo ago
It's 2026 and we're turning troll/fake spec submissions into actual usable technology. What a time to be alive. There's only one thing in the article I disagree with: > RIRs (ARIN, RIPE, APNIC) Go Financially Bankrupt This is purely an argument of pragmatism, rather than having any technical merit. If a system works, and meaningfully improves over another system, I couldn't care less that people aren't able to effectively monetize it.
- turborigby 2mo ago
  RIRs (RIPE NCC, ARIN, APNIC, etc.) are non-profit membership organizations, not commercial entities trying to "monetize" IP addresses. Their registration fees directly fund critical global Internet infrastructure: the WHOIS databases, RPKI trust anchors, root DNS servers, and policy governance. If their operational budget collapses by 90%, it's not a loss of "profit" - it means there is literally no one funded to maintain the authoritative registry of who owns which ASN and route origin authorizations. And even setting governance and economics aside, the technical failure modes remain fatal: 28-byte header PMTU blackholing, uRPF collisions on multi-homed links, and ASIC slow-path punting on existing linecards.
- lrasinen 2mo ago
  There's precedent, IP over Avian Carriers was tested back in 2001.
- torginus 2mo ago
  I think it's kinda cool to see how things would pan out instead of just plain theorycrafting - even if this isn't a serious proposal, it can be a start of one.
danielrmay 2mo ago
This is absurd and I love it.
altairprime 2mo ago
Thanks for going through the work of testing this. Better to have the actual results for a joke than to joke about theories :)
exabrial 2mo ago
The "no flag day" is how ipv6 should have been engineered.
- wmf 2mo ago
  IPv6 never had flag days and was specifically designed for gradual deployment. In retrospect, overly conservative "ships in the night" routing increased costs and delayed IPv6 deployment though.
- Dagger2 2mo ago
  It was engineered like that. It was known from the start that having a flag day wasn't possible (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1726#section-5.5 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1726#section-5.5): We believe that it is not possible to have a "flag-day" form of transition in which all hosts and routers must change over at once. The size, complexity, and distributed administration of the Internet make such a cutover impossible. And when they picked a design, it indeed didn't have a flag day (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-hinden-ipng-overview-00#section-1 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-hinden-ipng-over...): IPng is a new version of IP which is designed to be an evolutionary step from IPv4. It is a natural increment to IPv4. It can be installed as a normal software upgrade in internet devices and is interoperable with the current IPv4. Its deployment strategy was designed to not have any "flag" days. If saying "we can't have/didn't do a flag day" in the design documents, and then not having a flag day, isn't enough to stop you from arguing that v6 should have been engineered without a flag day, I have to wonder what v6 could possibly have done to make you happy with it.

73 points by turborigby 2mo ago

Hey HN, A few weeks ago, the "Internet Protocol Version 8 (IPv8)" Internet-Draft (draft-thain-ipv8-02) caught our eye. The draft proposes replacing IPv4/IPv6 with a 64-bit hierarchical structure (ASN.Host), giving every 32-bit ASN holder 4.3 billion host addresses and consolidating DHCP, DNS, NTP, Syslog, OAuth, and WHOIS into a unified "Zone Server". Instead of just debating the theoretical viability on mailing lists, our team at goonhost.rocks decided to implement the entire specification from scratch to see what happens when you deploy it across a distributed multi-AS network. What we built: - Linux Kernel 6.6: Native AF_INET8 (family 46) socket layer, 28-byte packet routing, and sysctl boundary filters. https://gitlab.turborigby.xyz/goonhost-experiments/linux https://gitlab.turborigby.xyz/goonhost-experiments/linux - Musl Libc: sockaddr_in8, inet_pton8, getaddrinfo() resolver support. https://gitlab.turborigby.xyz/goonhost-experiments/musl https://gitlab.turborigby.xyz/goonhost-experiments/musl - iproute2: Native `ip -8 route` and `ip -8 addr` CLI tooling. https://gitlab.turborigby.xyz/goonhost-experiments/iproute2 https://gitlab.turborigby.xyz/goonhost-experiments/iproute2 - FRRouting: BGP8 daemon with Multi-Protocol Extensions (AFI/SAFI). https://gitlab.turborigby.xyz/goonhost-experiments/frrouting https://gitlab.turborigby.xyz/goonhost-experiments/frrouting - IPv8 Zone Server (Go): 10-protocol platform (DHCP8, DNS8 TYPE_A8 88, SNTP, NetLog8, OAuth8, WHOIS8, XLATE8). https://gitlab.turborigby.xyz/goonhost-experiments/zoneserver https://gitlab.turborigby.xyz/goonhost-experiments/zoneserve... - Nginx & cURL: Patched for 64-bit IPv8 HTTP traffic. https://gitlab.turborigby.xyz/goonhost-experiments/nginx https://gitlab.turborigby.xyz/goonhost-experiments/nginx https://gitlab.turborigby.xyz/goonhost-experiments/curl https://gitlab.turborigby.xyz/goonhost-experiments/curl We set up a 10-node QEMU multi-AS testbed across 4 Autonomous Systems, pushed 112,000+ active routes into the kernel FIB, and ran continuous traffic generation. While it works smoothly in an isolated lab, our report highlights several fundamental real-world failure modes: 1. PMTU & Silent MSS Blackholing (28-byte IP header breaks 1500-byte MTU paths without 1452-byte MSS clamping). 2. Asymmetric uRPF / BCP 38 drops on multi-homed ASNs. 3. Legacy DC switch ASIC/TCAM incompatibility (EtherType 0x88B8 punts to CPU exception path). 4. Monolithic Zone Server DDoS blast radius. 5. Systemic economic crises: RIR funding model collapse (90% revenue drop) and global BGP DFZ table explosion (3M–5M+ routes). Full research report: https://cdnnn.goonhost.rocks/IPV8_RESEARCH_REPORT.md https://cdnnn.goonhost.rocks/IPV8_RESEARCH_REPORT.md

ameliaquining 2mo ago
Your Markdown-format research report is full of mojibake, you might want to fix that.
- lschueller 2mo ago
  Seems to be a 404 now.
- turborigby 2mo ago
  Fixed the Content-Type header on R2 CDN, the UTF-8 box-drawing diagrams should render cleanly now. Thanks for pointing it out!

wbsun 2mo ago

isn't any ipv6+ supposed to use any string address and no DNS is required at all? :D

nairboon 2mo ago

Where is IPv7?

xp84 2mo ago
I have that RFC on my iPhone 9
hk1337 2mo ago
It's like how we skipped from Windows 95 to Windows 98
- itintheory 2mo ago
  I think those were release years. More like how we went from Windows 8 to 10. (I understand that the real reason here is either a) OSX went to version 10, so don't want to be behind, or b) many systems would pattern match on windows version 9*" so Windows 9 would be treated as 95/98.)
  - WorldMaker 2mo ago
    Examples of B were found in open source, including some versions of the OpenJDK. Mac OS was said to skip 9 on the way to 10 due to a combo of some Asian numerology (just as Western numerology often encourages skipping "unlucky" 13) and also trying to make a clean break more obvious between System 8 and OSX. (The X being the 10, as Apple's favorite way to write 10 for various reasons. Which is why "OSX" was always a misnomer, accidentally burning the version number into the operating system name. Part of why Apple has been trying to get everyone on the "macOS" brand lately to pull the version number back out.)
    - wmf 2mo ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_9
    - kstrauser 2mo ago
      Uh, Mac OS 9 existed. It shipped with early iMacs before OS X was stable and for people who needed to run old apps natively.

ahmetozer 2mo ago

Thanks for testing, in year 2026, still IPv6 is not fully well utilized homes, corporates especially it is worse at clouds (AWS, GCP) if you not limit north to south, they are not good for east-to-west compared to telco providers. For example, GCP uses IP forwarding for IPv6 real IP address is not allocated at machine. At some of the components which is EKS is not support every case at IPv6. So IPv8 can be available around year 2300 I guess :) (i have not inspected v8 RFC yet)

clhodapp 2mo ago
IPv8 is just a reactionary response to IPv6 not being "IPv4 with larger addresses" like people who know IPv4 well would prefer. There would be no reason to adopt it if IPv6 were adopted.
- hdgvhicv 2mo ago
  Yet IPv6 hasn’t been adopted. For decades. Because it wasn’t implemented transparently at the OS. I can’t plug in to my ip6 only network and reach an ip4 address because end user OSes don’t implement clat transparently, even today in 2026, let alone 20 years ago.
  - adw 2mo ago
    > Yet IPv6 hasn’t been adopted. news to literally anyone on a mobile internet connection (which is most internet connections!)
    - alexpotato 2mo ago
      I learned recently that France IPv6 adoption is also very high.
    - hdgvhicv 2mo ago
      I’m on 4g My v6 endpoint is unreachable. My v4 one is fine.
    - ahmetozer 2mo ago

TD-Linux 2mo ago

There is no "IPv8". Any crackpot can submit an internet-draft to the IETF, and this person happened to call theirs IPv8. If the submitter actually read the draft rather than feeding it to the slop cannon, they would have realized it is also a LLM hallucination that someone uploaded to IETF.

deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
stackghost 2mo ago
OpenPGP key servers are an internet draft, if memory serves. I guess they don't exist either.
- ameliaquining 2mo ago
  In fairness, they exist by virtue of having working implementations that (at least a few) people actually use, not by virtue of being an Internet-Draft.
- TD-Linux 2mo ago
  It is not an individual I-D, but has been adopted by a working group, and has a chance of actually being published as a RFC.
- Magicrafter13 2mo ago
  they are disgustingly slow so maybe we need a new draft...
- brohee 2mo ago
  SCEP was (and still is) a very deployed protocol yet took 20 years for the draft to be published...
ameliaquining 2mo ago
I am fairly sure the authors do understand this (see: "Most network engineers would laugh this off as an April Fools RFC written by an enterprise architect on buzzword overdrive."). But since the proposal got a lot of attention, responding to it is a public service. And delegating this to an LLM arguably provides an accurate signal as to how much human attention the original proposal deserved :-P

foo-bar-baz529 2mo ago

The whole site appears to be satire, based on the homepage. I think we can ignore this article of theirs as well.

kstrauser 2mo ago
What’s wrong with satire sites? If The Onion put in the work to try this, I’d still be interested in hearing about it.
- foo-bar-baz529 2mo ago
  It’s true that satire is not always bad. But I dislike that they don’t make it obvious that this article is satire. It wastes people’s time who actually take it seriously (as we can see by the other HN comments). Or if it’s serious, then why is it on a satire site? They need to pick a lane and be clear about it.
  - kstrauser 2mo ago
    It wasn't clear to me that this was a satire article. It seemed like a reasonably serious experiment with a bad idea.
turborigby 2mo ago
Feel free to sign up and deploy a VM - we are a very real VPS host! Unlike boring corporate providers, we just actually have a sense of humor (or more accurately, the developer has overdosed on TikToks and brainrot reels). Satirical branding doesn't mean the bare-metal servers or the kernel code aren't real.

kstrauser 2mo ago

I appreciate this. IPv8 is a terrible, terrible idea, and it’s good to see someone actually built it out to prove the depths of its terribleness. Well done.

ameliaquining 2mo ago

Question for someone who knows more about this stuff than I do: Why don't the problems in the "economic collapse" section also apply to IPv6? Or do they, and we've only been saved by lack of adoption?

wmf 2mo ago
For one thing, RIRs are not businesses. If they have less work to do they can have less staff. Worst case they could receive government funding like in the old days.
- ameliaquining 2mo ago
  Would they in fact have less work to do? Government funding might be the right answer, but it's not necessarily going to happen automatically; the concern (which applies in other domains besides this one) is disrupting the means by which a public good is currently funded, without having a replacement already lined up. Also there's a subsection about tier 1 networks and those are businesses.

citruscomputing 2mo ago

Did you implement it, or did Claude implement it?

basscomm 2mo ago
I'm pretty sure an AI wrote all or most of this article.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

Magicrafter13 2mo ago

It's 2026 and we're turning troll/fake spec submissions into actual usable technology. What a time to be alive. There's only one thing in the article I disagree with: > RIRs (ARIN, RIPE, APNIC) Go Financially Bankrupt This is purely an argument of pragmatism, rather than having any technical merit. If a system works, and meaningfully improves over another system, I couldn't care less that people aren't able to effectively monetize it.

turborigby 2mo ago
RIRs (RIPE NCC, ARIN, APNIC, etc.) are non-profit membership organizations, not commercial entities trying to "monetize" IP addresses. Their registration fees directly fund critical global Internet infrastructure: the WHOIS databases, RPKI trust anchors, root DNS servers, and policy governance. If their operational budget collapses by 90%, it's not a loss of "profit" - it means there is literally no one funded to maintain the authoritative registry of who owns which ASN and route origin authorizations. And even setting governance and economics aside, the technical failure modes remain fatal: 28-byte header PMTU blackholing, uRPF collisions on multi-homed links, and ASIC slow-path punting on existing linecards.
lrasinen 2mo ago
There's precedent, IP over Avian Carriers was tested back in 2001.
torginus 2mo ago
I think it's kinda cool to see how things would pan out instead of just plain theorycrafting - even if this isn't a serious proposal, it can be a start of one.

danielrmay 2mo ago

This is absurd and I love it.

altairprime 2mo ago

Thanks for going through the work of testing this. Better to have the actual results for a joke than to joke about theories :)

exabrial 2mo ago

The "no flag day" is how ipv6 should have been engineered.

wmf 2mo ago
IPv6 never had flag days and was specifically designed for gradual deployment. In retrospect, overly conservative "ships in the night" routing increased costs and delayed IPv6 deployment though.
Dagger2 2mo ago
It was engineered like that. It was known from the start that having a flag day wasn't possible (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1726#section-5.5 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1726#section-5.5): We believe that it is not possible to have a "flag-day" form of transition in which all hosts and routers must change over at once. The size, complexity, and distributed administration of the Internet make such a cutover impossible. And when they picked a design, it indeed didn't have a flag day (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-hinden-ipng-overview-00#section-1 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-hinden-ipng-over...): IPng is a new version of IP which is designed to be an evolutionary step from IPv4. It is a natural increment to IPv4. It can be installed as a normal software upgrade in internet devices and is interoperable with the current IPv4. Its deployment strategy was designed to not have any "flag" days. If saying "we can't have/didn't do a flag day" in the design documents, and then not having a flag day, isn't enough to stop you from arguing that v6 should have been engineered without a flag day, I have to wonder what v6 could possibly have done to make you happy with it.