Progress on the Linux kernel GTP code

Harald Welte — Sat, 07 Nov 2015 16:00:00 GMT

It is always sad if you start to develop some project and then never get around finishing it, as there are too many things to take care in parallel. But then, days only have 24 hours...

Back in 2012 I started to write some generic Linux kernel GTP tunneling code. GTP is the GPRS Tunneling Protocol, a protocol between core network elements in GPRS networks, later extended to be used in UMTS and even LTE networks.

GTP is split in a control plane for management and the user plane carrying the actual user IP traffic of a mobile subscriber. So if you're reading this blog via a cellular interent connection, your data is carried in GTP-U within the cellular core network.

To me as a former Linux kernel networking developer, the user plane of GTP (GTP-U) had always belonged into kernel space. It is a tunneling protocol not too different from many other tunneling protocols that already exist (GRE, IPIP, L2TP, PPP, ...) and for the user plane, all it does is basically add a header in one direction and remove the header in the other direction. User data, particularly in networks with many subscribers and/or high bandwidth use.

Also, unlike many other telecom / cellular protocols, GTP is an IP-only protocol with no E1, Frame Relay or ATM legacy. It also has nothing to do with SS7, nor does it use ASN.1 syntax and/or some exotic encoding rules. In summary, it is nothing like any other GSM/3GPP protocol, and looks much more of what you're used from the IETF/Internet world.

Unfortunately I didn't get very far with my code back in 2012, but luckily Pablo Neira (one of my colleagues from netfilter/iptables days) picked it up and brought it along. However, for some time it has been stalled until recently it was thankfully picked up by Andreas Schultz and now receives some attention and discussion, with the clear intention to finish + submit it for mainline inclusion.

The code is now kept in a git repository at http://git.osmocom.org/osmo-gtp-kernel/

Thanks to Pablo and Andreas for picking this up, let's hope this is the last coding sprint before it goes mainline and gets actually used in production.

LaForge's home page (Posts about ggsn)

Progress on the Linux kernel GTP code