Feature #6103
openmove from 1:1 relationship of UDP socket and net-device to a N:M relationship
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Description
As it was only recently discovered, there appears to be a conceptual constraint in the kernel GTP module.
The original module was developed for a very simplistic use case, where there is a 1:1 mapping between UDP sockets and gtp net-devices. This works fine for a GGSN/P-GW that implements one APN.
However, any non-trivial deployment will likely need support for multiple APNs. An APN is something like a label that identifies an external IP network (can be a private network or public internert).
Currently, AFAICT, the only way to achieve this is to create one UDP socket for each APN, as there's a 1:1 mapping to net-devices. While this may be acceptable in a lab network, this doesn't really match the "production" use cases of many real-world networks. The reason is:- you usually only have very limited IP addresses that are routed (and advertised) in the IPX/GRX towards other cellular operators
- 3GPP protocols do not support the use of non-standard port numbers, i.e. there can only be one GTP socket per IP address.
From a 3GPP point of view, any GSN can implement any number of APN even on a single IP address.
So what would be needed to support those setups would be to de-couple the enabling of GTP kernel driver on a udp socket from the creating a gtp net-device operations. Having those two separate means you can do something like- have a single UDP socket and enable the kernel GTP driver
- create any number of gtp net-devices (one for each APN you want to support), possibly use them in separate netns/vrf/... as you want.
- each tunnel that is created by userspace (GTP_CMD_NEWPDP) then indicates
- to which UDP socket it belongs
- to which net-device it belongs
AFAICT, we already have gtp_tunnel_set_ifidx
in libgtpnl, which then puts the GTPA_LINK, attribute into the GTP_CMD_NEWPDP), so no change is required there.
- attaching the GTP driver to a pre-existing UDP socket
- creating a new UDP socket for a GTP driver
pablo, am I understanding the code correctly? I'm looking for feedback to make sure we have a common understanding of the current situation, and then possibly as a second step to see how we could change it and what kind of effort that might be.
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