How to support 50K IPv6 addresses on a single machine?

[cksen]

Hi,

Does anyone know if there is any way to configure 50K "virtual" IPv6 addresses on loopback device in Linux?
The aim is not to add all 50K IPv6 addresses one by one on the loopback/ETH device which will probably mess up the ip table on the system.
In IPv4, I am able to achieve that by specifying the IP address subnet on loopback device (e.g: "ip addr add 10.1.0.0/16 dev lo").
The same command does not seem to work the same way for IPv6. It only adds a single IPv6 address on loopback device and it automatically adds an "unreachable route" entry on the ipv6 route table for that IPv6 network prefix.

The reason I need this is because I am working on an application which tries to simulate 50K IPv6 addresses on a single Linux box.
The kernel version I am currently using is RHEL 2.6.9.55.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!!

Thanks!

Kai

[Rubberman]

Well, that's a pretty old kernel. RHEL is currently at 2.6.18-164.11. It may be that there are updates to the IP network stack since your system was installed/updated which will affect this. Don't know for sure. You need to check w/ Red Hat directly I think. If you don't have an active subscription, you can at least post your question to their user/support forums.

[cksen]

Thanks for your reply and suggestion.

[cksen]

I just tried on RHEL5 (2.6.18-164) kernel and still see the same behavior.

[Rubberman]

Well, I'm not familiar with IPv6 on my system as yet - my ISP doesn't support it unless I want to get T1 service - so it is kind of a moot point as far as I'm concerned. As I said, you might want to post your question to the actual Red Hat forums. Someone there likely has an answer you can use.

[cksen]

Yup, I have submitted the question to Red Hat support center. Hopefully I can get some answer pretty soon.
Thanks!

[jmrcpn]

have you found a neat solution???
proposed solution are cumbersome and are missing the whole ipv4 loopback magic.

I am really missing the multiple ip loopback capability on ipv4; Such you can test application traffic ip handling running locally on the same sytem knowing the whole 127.0.0.0/8 ip range is fully yours, not be worry about outside interference, simulating multiple server working together.

My understanding ipv6 prefix fc00:: was doing the exact purpose, but was scrapped by RFC3879, for concerns which still escape me...