FreeBSD Snapshots without IPv4 support
For more general information on FreeBSD and IPv6 see http://www.freebsd.org/ipv6/.
Snapshots
NOTE (2019): Over the last years no new No-IPv4 (No-INET / IPv6-Only) snapshots were build. The possibility to build them has been retained in FreeBSD so you can do it yourself until we, again, might publish new snapshots.
Latest updates: 10.0-RELEASE snapshot builds published.
(xz compressed) no-IPv4 support kernel HEAD snapshots were build:
- ipv6only-snapshot-20110506
- ipv6only-snapshot-20110603 (incl. bsdinstall network installation support)
- ipv6only-snapshot-20110606 (incl. RFC6106 DNS search list and name server support in rtsol(d), also when installing)
- ipv6only-snapshot-9.0-BETA1
- noinet-snapshot-9.0-RC3
- noinet-snapshot-9.0-RELEASE
- noinet-snapshot-head-2012-02-r230847
- noinet-snapshot-10.0-RELEASE-r260789
Snapshots are available for download from
http://noinet.nyi.freebsd.org/snapshots/ (America, East Coast)
and the following mirrors:
http://sources.zabbadoz.net/freebsd/ipv6only/ (Europe, Germany)
http://pub.allbsd.org/FreeBSD-ipv6only (Asia, Japan)
- rsync://rsync.allbsd.org/freebsd-ipv6only/ (Asia, Japan)
for testing.
Checking checksums make sure to validate the the files depending on whether they were originally compressed or not.
For PC-BSD IPv6-only snapshots please check the PC-BSD IPv6 Website.
How to do network installs of snapshots
When using the bootonly.iso you will be asked to configure a network interface at one point in the installation. Chose your interface and follow the dialog. You can either select stateless address auto-configuration (SLAAC) or static addressing. In case of SLAAC you may learn DNS search list and nameserver information from your router (if supported) or you will have to manually enter at least on IPv6 address of a usable resolver. Follow the BSDInstall dialogs for partitioning until your get to the mirror selection. Chose Other and enter the URL. As URL you need to use the mirror you used from above, followed by the snapshot name, architecture selected and ftp, e.g. http://noinet.nyi.freebsd.org/snapshots/noinet-snapshot-9.0-RELEASE/amd64/ftp/.
Note: if these snapshots are built from the FreeBSD HEAD (development) branch, your install screen might be mangled by console output. You should still see the progress bar updating but you will not get a cleaned up dialog screen until the current step of installation is finished.
Contact
If you find this interesting, have feedback, try it out, want to help, contact BjoernZeeb or post to the FreeBSD network mailing list.
Outstanding patches
ftp client: http://people.freebsd.org/~bz/20110528-06-FF-ftp.diff (no longer applies after update)
cvs client for pserver mode: http://people.freebsd.org/~bz/patch-20110103-01-cvs-client-ipv6-pserver.diff
Background information
The kernel without IPv4 support has started as a research project around the time when FreeBSD Jails gained IPv6 support and it became possible to have jails without IPv4. The FreeBSD kernel has long been able to be compiled without INET6 so feature parity was called for. As an intermediate step there were efforts to get the kernel compiling without any IP support at all.
As of SVN r221353 FreeBSD is now able to compile a kernel with only INET (IPv4) support, only INET6 (IPv6) support, both or neither in FreeBSD HEAD (pre-9.0 and later) and it was taken care that additional LINT kernel configurations were build during universe builds to catch possible breakage. Thanks to the FreeBSD Foundation and iXsystems sponsoring this integration and IPv6 work and thanks to George Neville-Neil for providing technical review and a lot of other people helping with review for user space or resources.