Cellular Network Infrastructure » Core Network (CN) » OsmoGGSN (former OpenGGSN)

12 years after OpenGGSN was seemingly abandoned by its original creators, and 7 years after Osmocom adopted it, it is time for a significant change:

OpenGGSN is becoming a first-class Osmocom citizen called OsmoGGSN.

We had already taken some baby-steps in the past by introduction of a CTRL interface as well as the use of libosmocore logging. However, my recent patches introducing a VTY interface and changing the configuration file format from the 'gengetopt' style to libosmovty based change the look+feel of the program significantly that it is a good point to rename.

After all, if command-line arguments and config file syntax are changing, documentation will also need to change and it becomes confusing to users to understand that depending on the version the documentation is correct or incorrect.

So from today on,

• osmo-ggsn is available from http://git.osmocom.org/osmo-ggsn/
• corresponding user manual available from http://ftp.osmocom.org/docs/latest/osmoggsn-usermanual.pdf
• osmocom:nightly packages will build only osmo-ggsn
• redmine still at http://osmocom.org/projects/openggsn due to
  permanent redmine project naming...

The introduction of the VTY interface comes with many new possibilities, such as

• multiple GGSN instances bound to different GTP IP addresses
• multiple APNs within each GGSN, each with different Address Pools and
  tun-devices
• sophisticated logging configuration (syslog, file, stdout, telnet)

What's still missing:

• re-integrate kernel GTP-U support
• create OsmoGGSN VTY reference manual
• perl/python script to convert old config file to new config file format (any volunteers?)

Roadmap:

• IPv6 transport plane support (outer IP layer surrounding GTP/UDP)
• improved logging (ensure context is always included)
• libgtp: migration of kernel GTP-U support into libgtp (not just ggsn)
• libgtp: make PDP context hash table part of the 'gsn' structure
• once all expected ABI/API changes are done, rename libgtp to libosmo-gtp

In terms of maintenance, I don't want to continue to maintain OpenGGSN for much longer. We'll keep it around for some time and merge important security and/or bug fixes, but I won't accept new feature patches into OpenGGSN.