Linux BNG

Sat Jul 14 19:16:33 UTC 2018

On 2018-07-14 15:13, Baldur Norddahl wrote:
> Hello
> 
> I am investigating Linux as a BNG. The BNG (Broadband Network Gateway)
> being the thing that acts as default gateway for our customers.
> 
> The setup is one VLAN per customer. Because 4095 VLANs is not enough,
> we have QinQ with double VLAN tagging on the customers. The customers
> can use DHCP or static configuration. DHCP packets need to be option82
> tagged and forwarded to a DHCP server. Every customer has one or more
> static IP addresses.
> 
> IPv4 subnets need to be shared among multiple customers to conserve
> address space. We are currently using /26 IPv4 subnets with 60
> customers sharing the same default gateway and netmask. In Linux terms
> this means 60 VLAN interfaces per bridge interface.
> 
> However Linux is not quite ready for the task. The primary problem
> being that the system does not scale to thousands of VLAN interfaces.
> 
> We do not want customers to be able to send non routed packets
> directly to each other (needs proxy arp). Also customers should not be
> able to steal another customers IP address. We want to hard code the
> relation between IP address and VLAN tagging. This can be implemented
> using ebtables, but we are unsure that it could scale to thousands of
> customers.
> 
> I am considering writing a small program or kernel module. This would
> create two TAP devices (tap0 and tap1). Traffic received on tap0 with
> VLAN tagging, will be stripped of VLAN tagging and delivered on tap1.
> Traffic received on tap1 without VLAN tagging, will be tagged
> according to a lookup table using the destination IP address and then
> delivered on tap0. ARP and DHCP would need some special handling.
> 
> This would be completely stateless for the IPv4 implementation. The
> IPv6 implementation would be harder, because Link Local addressing
> needs to be supported and that can not be stateless. The customer CPE
> will make up its own Link Local address based on its MAC address and
> we do not know what that is in advance.
> 
> The goal is to support traffic of minimum of 10 Gbit/s per server.
> Ideally I would have a server with 4x 10 Gbit/s interfaces combined
> into two 20 Gbit/s channels using bonding (LACP). One channel each for
> upstream and downstream (customer facing). The upstream would be layer
> 3 untagged and routed traffic to our transit routers.
> 
> I am looking for comments, ideas or alternatives. Right now I am
> considering what kind of CPU would be best for this. Unless I take
> steps to mitigate, the workload would probably go to one CPU core only
> and be limited to things like CPU cache and PCI bus bandwidth.
> 
accel-ppp supports IPoE termination for both IPv4 and IPv6, with radius 
and everything.
It is also done such way, that it will utilize multicore server 
efficiently (might need some tuning, depends on hardware).
It should handle 2x10G easily on decent server, about 4x10 it depends on 
your hardware and how well tuning are done.