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

mpromonet
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5 Answers5

25

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.

3

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.

bortzmeyer
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  • Can anyone confirm? I recall IPv6 being available on Debian. –  Jul 10 '12 at 19:51
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    Yes, it looks like that. I run Debian ARM on a SLUG, which run IPv6, but the Raspberry Pi doesn't. This is really bad. :( – Anders Jul 15 '12 at 02:46
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).

Ben Clifford
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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.

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Just to update this answer, the issue is there are many version of Raspberry Pi and (as of today) two Raspbian (Debian) version available.
Wheezy
IPV6 is not active by default. You can activate with
sudo modprobe ipv6 and ipv6 will show up on your next ifconfig. To make the change permanent must modify the list of modules on /etc/modules and append ipv6 (this is the module name).
To support ipv6, your /etc/networks/interfaces file will look like:

iface wlan0 inet6 auto
auto wlan0
allow-hotplug wlan0

iface wlan0 inet dhcp
  wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

Jessie
IPV6 is active and loaded by default. No changes required.

fcm
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