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GIF(4) Kernel Interfaces Manual GIF(4) NAME gif -- generic tunnel interface SYNOPSIS device gif DESCRIPTION The gif interface is a generic tunnelling device for IPv4 and IPv6. It can tunnel IPv[46] traffic over IPv[46]. Therefore, there can be four possible configurations. The behavior of gif is mainly based on RFC2893 IPv6-over- IPv4 configured tunnel. On NetBSD, gif can also tunnel ISO traffic over IPv[46] using EON encapsulation. Note that gif does not perform GRE encap- sulation; use gre(4) for GRE encapsulation. The gif interface can also tunnel Ethernet traffic over IPv4 or IPv6 when combined with a if_bridge(4) interface using EtherIP protocol. See if_bridge(4) for detailed setup. Each gif interface is created at runtime using interface cloning. This is most easily done with the "ifconfig create" command or using the ifconfig_<interface> variable in rc.conf(5). To use gif, the administrator needs to configure the protocol and addresses used for the outer header. This can be done by using ifconfig(8) tunnel, or SIOCSIFPHYADDR ioctl. The administrator also needs to configure the protocol and addresses for the inner header, with ifconfig(8). Note that IPv6 link-local addresses (those that start with fe80::) will be automati- cally configured whenever possible. You may need to remove IPv6 link-local addresses manually using ifconfig(8), if you want to disable the use of IPv6 as the inner header (for example, if you need a pure IPv4-over-IPv6 tunnel). Finally, you must modify the routing table to route the packets through the gif interface. MTU Configuration and Path MTU Discovery The gif interface uses the fixed length, 1280, to determine whether the outgoing IPv6 packets are split. This means the MTU value configured on the interface will be ignored when the outer protocol is IPv6. When the NOCLAMP interface flag is set, gif uses the same configured value as IPv4 communications. This behavior prevents potential issues when the path MTU is smaller than the interface MTU. This section describes the reason why the default behavior is different. The NOCLAMP interface flag can be set using the following command: ifconfig gif0 noclamp and clear the flag using the following: ifconfig gif0 -noclamp where gif0 is the actual interface name. A tunnel interface always has an implicit smaller MTU for the inner proto- col than the outer protocol because of the additional header. Note that the interface MTU on a gif interface, the default value is 1280, is used as MTU for the outer protocol. This means that the MTU for the inner protocol varies depending on the outer protocol header length. If an outgoing packet bigger than the inner protocol MTU arrives at a gif interface for encapsulation, it will be split into fragments. Specifically, if IPv4 is used as the outer protocol, the inner is 20 octets smaller than the inter- face MTU. In the case of the default interface MTU, 1280, inner packets bigger than 1260 will be fragmented. In the case of IPv6, the inner is 40 octets smaller than the outer. This fragmentation is not harmful though it can degrade the performance. Note that while an increased MTU on gif interface helps to mitigate this reduced performance issue, it can also cause packet losses on the interme- diate narrowest path between the two communication endpoints in IPv6. IPv6 allows fragmentation only on the sender, not on the routers in the communi- cation path. A big outgoing packet will be dropped on a router with a smaller MTU. In normal IPv6 communication, an ICMPv6 Packet Too Big error will be sent back to the sender, who can adjust the packet length and re-send it. This process is performed in the upper protocols than L3, such as TCP, and makes the packet length shorter so that packets go through the path without frag- mentation. This behavior is known as path MTU discovery. When using a gif interface, the Packet Too Big message is generated for the outer protocol. Since the gif interface does not translate this error to the inner protocol, the inner protocol sees it just as a packet loss with no useful information to adjust the length of the next packets. In this situation, path MTU discovery does not work, and communications of the in- ner protocol become stalled. In order to avoid this, a gif interface silently splits a packet of over 1240 octets into fragments to make the outer protocol packets equal or shorter than 1280 octets, even when the interface MTU is configured as larger than 1280. Note that this occurs only when the outer protocol is IPv6. 1280 is the smallest MTU in IPv6 and guarantees no packet loss oc- curs on intermediate routers. As mentioned earlier, the performance is sub-optimal if the actual path MTU is larger than 1280. A typical confusing scenario is as follows. The gif interface can have Ethernet, whose MTU is usually 1500, as the inner proto- col. It is called an EtherIP tunnel, and can be configured by adding the gif interface as a member of if_bridge(4) interface. The if_bridge(4) in- terface forcibly changes the MTU of the gif interface with those for the other member interfaces, which are likely 1500. In this case, a situation in which the MTU of the gif interface is 1500 but fragmentation in 1280 octets always occurs. The default behavior is most conservative to prevent confusing packet loss. Depending on the network configuration, enabling the NOCLAMP interface flag might be helpful for better performance. It is crucial to ensure that the path MTU is equal to or larger than the interface MTU when enabling this flag. ECN friendly behavior The gif device can be configured to be ECN friendly, as described in draft-ietf-ipsec-ecn-02.txt. This is turned off by default, and can be turned on by the IFF_LINK1 interface flag. Without IFF_LINK1, gif will show normal behavior, as described in RFC2893. This can be summarized as follows: Ingress Set outer TOS bit to 0. Egress Drop outer TOS bit. With IFF_LINK1, gif will copy ECN bits (0x02 and 0x01 on IPv4 TOS byte or IPv6 traffic class byte) on egress and ingress, as follows: Ingress Copy TOS bits except for ECN CE (masked with 0xfe) from in- ner to outer. Set ECN CE bit to 0. Egress Use inner TOS bits with some change. If outer ECN CE bit is 1, enable ECN CE bit on the inner. Note that the ECN friendly behavior violates RFC2893. This should be used in mutual agreement with the peer. Security A malicious party may try to circumvent security filters by using tunnelled packets. For better protection, gif performs both martian and ingress fil- tering against the outer source address on egress. Note that mart- ian/ingress filters are in no way complete. You may want to secure your node by using packet filters. Ingress filtering can break tunnel operation in an asymmetrically routed network. It can be turned off by IFF_LINK2 bit. Miscellaneous By default, gif tunnels may not be nested. This behavior may be modified at runtime by setting the sysctl(8) variable net.link.gif.max_nesting to the desired level of nesting. SEE ALSO gre(4), if_bridge(4), inet(4), inet6(4), ifconfig(8) R. Gilligan and E. Nordmark, "Transition Mechanisms for IPv6 Hosts and Routers", RFC2893, http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2893, August 2000. Sally Floyd, David L. Black, and K. K. Ramakrishnan, IPsec Interactions with ECN, December 1999, draft-ietf-ipsec-ecn-02.txt. R. Housley and S. Hollenbeck, EtherIP: Tunneling Ethernet Frames in IP Datagrams, RFC 3378, September 2002. HISTORY The gif device first appeared in the WIDE hydrangea IPv6 kit. BUGS There are many tunnelling protocol specifications, all defined differently from each other. The gif device may not interoperate with peers which are based on different specifications, and are picky about outer header fields. For example, you cannot usually use gif to talk with IPsec devices that use IPsec tunnel mode. If the outer protocol is IPv4, gif does not try to perform path MTU discov- ery for the encapsulated packet (DF bit is set to 0). If the outer protocol is IPv6, path MTU discovery for encapsulated packets may affect communication over the interface. The first bigger-than-pmtu packet may be lost. To avoid the problem, you may want to set the inter- face MTU for gif to 1240 or smaller, when the outer header is IPv6 and the inner header is IPv4. The gif device does not translate ICMP messages for the outer header into the inner header. In the past, gif had a multi-destination behavior, configurable via NOCLAMP flag. The behavior is obsolete and is no longer supported. This flag is now used to determine whether performing fragmentation when the outer pro- tocol is IPv6. FreeBSD ports 15.quarterly August 27, 2025 GIF(4)
NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | SEE ALSO | HISTORY | BUGS
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