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Contiki 2.6: IPv6 For Everything, Everywhere

Posted by Soulskill on from the your-footstool-is-broadcasting-an-IP-address dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The Contiki project just released version 2.6 of its open source operating system for the Internet of Things, used to track city sound pollution, control street lights, read power meters, monitor radiation, among other things. The technology behind it? A really tiny IPv6 stack that fits in a few kilobytes of memory, allowing everything, everywhere to have an IPv6 address."

6 of 62 comments (clear)

  1. Broadcast and IPv6 by skydave · · Score: 5, Funny

    Is it bad that the first thing I thought of when I read the "your-footstool-is-broadcasting-an-IP-address dept" was that IPv6 doesn't support broadcast?

    1. Re:Broadcast and IPv6 by unixisc · · Score: 5, Informative

      IPv6 doesn't support broadcast. However, a multicast to address ff02::1 would result in a transmission to all nodes within the same local link, resulting in effectively the same thing (In fact, that's how router discovery happens in IPv6). Similarly, one could do a multicast to ff05::1 to reach all nodes in an organization, In other words, there are a lot more scopes in IPv6 that one can address.

  2. Significance? by mister2au · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Back in 2008, the same project was quoting "a code size of 11 kilobytes and a dynamic memory usage of less than 2 kilobytes" http://tech.slashdot.org/story/08/10/15/1839209/worlds-smallest-ipv6-stack-by-cisco-atmel-sics

    Now we have "fits in a few kilobytes of memory" ...

    So this seems to be a nice incremental improvement?

    Any experts on embedded systems able to give insight into the importance of (lets say) 16kB in the old version versus (lets again say) 4-6kB including dynamic stack ??

  3. Re:Great! Now just solve the routing problem! by unixisc · · Score: 4, Informative

    Precisely - just do a multicast transmission to address ff02::fb to get to all DNS servers on the local link, or to ff02::1:3 for all DHCP6 servers on the local link. In fact, that's how router advertizements would work.

  4. Re:Oh good by JSG · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yes you'd like to think there would firewalls installed on things like traffic lights. However as the fairly recent SCADA attacks demonstrate ...

  5. Re:Great! Now just solve the routing problem! by LingNoi · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Rain is probably a bigger problem. Not sure about in the states but the topical storms we get over here in monsoon season ruin all signals.