IPv6 connectivity

Question

Is IPv6 connectivity supported on the Raspberry Pi? If yes, is it enabled by default/how do I turn it on?

Answer 1

There are no hardware limitations for IPv6 connectivity, only software must support it. On Arch distribution, IPv6 is enabled by default, so if you have a router with DHCPv6 or RA, you will automatically get connected to the IPv6 internet.

Raspbian supports IPv6, but the kernel module is not loaded by default (which is a crying shame in the wake of recent developments). IPv6 can be enabled at run time by modprobe ipv6 command or at boot time by appending ipv6 to /etc/modules.

I would look into specific distributions' documentations to learn more about configuring IPv6 on the device.

Answer 2

No, in the recommended image (the Debian one, debian6-19-04-2012.zip), IPv6 is not present (neither in the kernel, nor in a module) despite what Tibor said.

stephane@raspberrypi:~$ ifconfig eth0
eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr b8:27:eb:ba:90:94  
      inet addr:192.168.2.38  Bcast:192.168.2.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
      UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1488  Metric:1
      RX packets:1014 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
      TX packets:398 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
      collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
      RX bytes:69236 (67.6 KiB)  TX bytes:57486 (56.1 KiB)

You have to recompile the kernel.

Answer 3

The squeeze debian image, debian6-19-04-2012.zip, does not come with ipv6.

There's a beta image out that is much more recent (and behaves much better for me in several other ways too), that does have IPv6. This is at http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/1435

Using that image, IPv6 came up automatically on boot (on my network which already has IPv6 configured).

Answer 4

I just tested the wheezy version (thanks to Ben for the link) and I can confirm IPv6 is OK. I did a fast test with "Debian wheezy+Apache2+Wordpress" and is working properly... slow... but not to bad for testing purpose. If you like to check you can go to "http://myraspberry.farm-net.eu". If you have a dual stack client you can view your ip addresses.