Hypothetically, if I wanted to stop using IPv4, is it already possible? What do I need to configure on my CachyOS, and do I have to change anything on the router
Given CF and Google won't offer it free NAT64, I'd be worried there's some catch with the others offering it for free. That old if I'm not paying then I'm the product jazz.
Pretty much yes already, but it’s not something to configure on your client but instead on your router/network. Most of my traffic is IPv6 without any client involvement due to DNS64.
Linux is able to do dual-stack, so why would you want to go IPv6 only? As for your home network, you surely can go IPv6 only but it might break some IoT devices. If you have a good router everything is in the settings.
I do believe the vast majority of this is cell traffic and in general a huge portion of Internet traffic is smartphones these days (or at least the traffic reaching Google).
End users in general are increasingly v6 - only ISPs old enough to own comically oversized allocations from long ago can still afford to hand public v4 addresses to all of their customers.
No ISP is doing v6 only. It's got to be dual stack because there are still so many services that are only reachable by v4.
If the CSP does not have enough public v4 addresses, which is most small or new CSPs, then they will either do CG-NAT (most fixed network providers do this) or DS-Lite (more popular with mobile networks).
Either way, a single public ipv4 is shared with many subscribers.
464xlat or DS-Lite or MAP-T means it's not v6 only, unless the only thing you consider is the UE WAN.
Tunneling v4 does not mean v4 disappears from the network design.
It means you don't have to worry about IPv4 in the network. You just set up your IPv4 gateway somewhere and the rest happens automatically. There is nothing to design really; no v4 subnets or DHCP or any of the other legacy baggage, except for that gateway.
I am very annoyed that in Switzerland, residential adoption of IPv6 is pretty decent but not a single mobile ISP has adopted IPv6 yet. Despite IPv6 being the backbone of 5G.
In Portugal, our mobile network infrastructure is slightly better than Switzerland’s in terms of average speed, yet it is still IPv4-only, and it is very common for ISPs to use CG-NAT.
Under these circumstances, the only way for an individual to access IPv6 is via a VPN whose servers are dual-stack.
It genuinely is much more work to implement, compared to the simplicity of v4.
https://www.ripe.net/publications/docs/ripe-690/
Most customers are not informed enough to care, and when v6 breaks it's service-affecting even if v4 is still working. I understand why small providers with small engineer staff drag their feet.
I used to work at an ISP in .nl with a few hundred thousand customers, and around 15 years ago we enabled ipv6 by default. It just works and has been working for a long time. Anyone claiming today that ipv6 is not ready is more than 15 years behind.
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I accidentally ran the same test by running up an IPv6 only VPS and was thinking why are all these sites blocked? Oh wait, they don't support IPv6, Noice!
Many services today are peer to peer, but require external servers like STUN to faciliate the connection because one or (likely) both peers are behind NAT. If the NAT is really bad it requires TURN, which basically means sending everything through an external server. Very inefficient.
NAT isn't even a security feature, it's a workaround to the limitations of IPv4 that causes issues, which requires other workarounds.
Firewall takes care of security, it's not like your device is wide open to the internet when you're using IPv6. You just skip all the other complicated bullshit necessary only because NAT complicates it.
Every IPv6 capable router I've had came with IPv6 firewall enabled and set to drop all inbound connections to the entire network by default.
While every device has their own publicly routable IP addresses, part of that route is still through one point, your router. That firewall protects everything on the IPv6 subnet. From that you can make exceptions if you do want to accept inbound connections to some port on some host, similar to port forwarding. Otherwise it's just as blocked from unwanted traffic as an IPv4 network.
Any type of device you'd connect to various other networks should have firewall on it regardless, for IPv4 and IPv6.
I'm excited to try v6-mostly once there is better support for nat64 on linux (and I move so I can have better ISP and can stop with NAT66). I tried running my servers vlan as v6-mostly but dealing with destination NAT46 caused some problems so I kept the dual stack network.
If you’re referring to the “provider-side” of the translator, you can implement it in terms of the stateless ipxlat driver by running NAT66 followed by ipxlat.
There already is but as 3rd-party kernel modules such as Jool and userspace tun drivers such as Tayga. It seems to work fine in my testing for outbound but inbound NAT 4->6 caused more trouble than it was worth.
My phone carrier doesn't use IPv6 and it pisses me off a little. I get CG-NAT IPv4 only.
My home network does get IPv6, a static /48 prefix in fact, giving me more /64 subnets than I could ever need. I run dual-stack not because I want to, but because I have to. I would drop IPv4 entirely if I could, but too much of the internet is IPv4 only.
My home network solves the phone carrier issue though. I'm using WireGuard to my home network, giving my phone a real IPv6 from that home prefix and routing me onto the internet. I can do this because thankfully my ISP grants me a public IPv4 address allowing my phone to connect to my server. Although it's a dynamic IP of course.
Many networking things would be a lot simpler without IPv4 and the many complicated workarounds necessary with the limited address pool.
More seriously, in an enterprise environment, stateful and predictable address assignment is nice. Also, AFAIK, SLAAC can't assign everything that DHCP can, like domain names.
It's not that big of a deal. But like, it's been ages. It's not that they can't support it; it's that they intentionally choose not to. Which is annoying.
It's not Linux users, though: https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=http&groupBy=ip_version&filters=os%253DLinux&dt=2026-01-18_2026-04-12.
According to cloudflare's tracker, which counts HTTP requests to cloudflare services, Linux has the worst IPv6 adoption rate, behind Windows, which is behind MacOS.
I'm even willing to be some of you clowns reading this right now have ipv6.disable=1 set.
Super great timing. IETF just announced their draft for IPv8 which is purpose built to get the IPv4 hold outs to finally come to 64bit because it's fully backwards compatible with IPv4 without requiring dual stack. It's going to be hard to say no to IPv8 if you're still stuck on IPv4.
Kind of feels like IPv8 will soon make IPv6 rollout efforts look like they were a waste of time.
It has the exact same drawbacks as IPv6. It has a different addressing scheme and a different packet structure. 8to4 is claimed to be a way to obtain backward compatibility but 6to4 already exists and does the same thing for IPv6.
This just an April fool published a couple of weeks too late.
Just to write it down: IETF did not announce anything. What you saw is a draft, and means exactly nothing. And a third standard, that tbh reads as if its ai-slop, will solve exactly nothing besides split everything further.
Also rofl at the "OAuth2 JWT" mix-in to the network protocol.
LuisE3Oliveira@reddit
Hypothetically, if I wanted to stop using IPv4, is it already possible? What do I need to configure on my CachyOS, and do I have to change anything on the router
Cube00@reddit
No chance yet, big players like GitHub are still IPv4 only.
throwaway234f32423df@reddit
my IPv6-only servers connect to Github just fine by using public NAT64 DNS servers
Cube00@reddit
Guess you're lucky that your VPS offers a free NAT64 gateway.
throwaway234f32423df@reddit
They don't, I just use the public ones that anybody can use.
Worldly_Topic@reddit
Those are just DNS64 servers right ? They still require your network to have a NAT64 gateway.
throwaway234f32423df@reddit
they are NAT64
here's a partial list: https://nat64.net/public-providers
Cube00@reddit
Given CF and Google won't offer it free NAT64, I'd be worried there's some catch with the others offering it for free. That old if I'm not paying then I'm the product jazz.
Worldly_Topic@reddit
Oh wow that is so cool.
At nat64.xyz they have mentioned at the exact nat64 prefixes too.
Now we just need 464xlat support in linux and everything's set.
Cruffe@reddit
Having to use any kind of NAT kinda takes away a big advantage with IPv6 though. A straight connection without unnecessary complications.
throwaway234f32423df@reddit
only traffic to dinosaur servers like Github goes through the NAT64 gateway, the other 99% of traffic is pure IPv6
khne522@reddit
Just drop this part. This is not, and has never been distro-specific. These things aren't.
There is nothing you can do. You are not an ISP. You are not the operator of services you consume.
Refael111@reddit
I mean you can always try, just disable your ipv4 address and browse as normal.
skyb0rg@reddit
Pretty much yes already, but it’s not something to configure on your client but instead on your router/network. Most of my traffic is IPv6 without any client involvement due to DNS64.
tchernobog84@reddit
Linux is able to do dual-stack, so why would you want to go IPv6 only? As for your home network, you surely can go IPv6 only but it might break some IoT devices. If you have a good router everything is in the settings.
zlice0@reddit
not really linux but holy. surprised. still aint never had it. kinda dont care to a this point lol
peakdecline@reddit
I do believe the vast majority of this is cell traffic and in general a huge portion of Internet traffic is smartphones these days (or at least the traffic reaching Google).
CmdrCollins@reddit
End users in general are increasingly v6 - only ISPs old enough to own comically oversized allocations from long ago can still afford to hand public v4 addresses to all of their customers.
PaulWalkerTexasRangr@reddit
No ISP is doing v6 only. It's got to be dual stack because there are still so many services that are only reachable by v4. If the CSP does not have enough public v4 addresses, which is most small or new CSPs, then they will either do CG-NAT (most fixed network providers do this) or DS-Lite (more popular with mobile networks). Either way, a single public ipv4 is shared with many subscribers.
TheBendit@reddit
This is simply not true. The majority of handset IPv6 deployments are V6-only, with DNS64, NAT64, and 464Xlat.
Linux supports it, MacOS supports it, iPhones/iPads support it, Android supports it.
The only problem left is Windows and that will be fixed this year.
Worldly_Topic@reddit
Only DNS64, not 464Xlat. There are patches available for NM and systemd-networkd though.
Recently a patchset for the linux kernel was posted as well. https://lore.kernel.org/netdev/20260319151230.655687-1-ralf@mandelbit.com/
tajetaje@reddit
The next release of networkmanager will actually have it, its on their main branch now. That kernel patch is very interesting though
Worldly_Topic@reddit
Oh they have merged it already. And it also looks like Fedora is planning to enable it by default https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/IPv6-Mostly_Support_In_NetworkManager
PaulWalkerTexasRangr@reddit
464xlat or DS-Lite or MAP-T means it's not v6 only, unless the only thing you consider is the UE WAN. Tunneling v4 does not mean v4 disappears from the network design.
eugay@reddit
iPhones on T-Mobile US are IPv6-only. No 464xlat.
TheBendit@reddit
It means you don't have to worry about IPv4 in the network. You just set up your IPv4 gateway somewhere and the rest happens automatically. There is nothing to design really; no v4 subnets or DHCP or any of the other legacy baggage, except for that gateway.
Hopeful-Ad-607@reddit
Uh we get CGNAT ipv4 shared addresses
cAtloVeR9998@reddit
I am very annoyed that in Switzerland, residential adoption of IPv6 is pretty decent but not a single mobile ISP has adopted IPv6 yet. Despite IPv6 being the backbone of 5G.
astindev@reddit
In Portugal, our mobile network infrastructure is slightly better than Switzerland’s in terms of average speed, yet it is still IPv4-only, and it is very common for ISPs to use CG-NAT.
Under these circumstances, the only way for an individual to access IPv6 is via a VPN whose servers are dual-stack.
2rad0@reddit
I was hoping it was from LLM agents so its waste of my router's resources would be limited to the more exclusive ipv4 club.
xcorv42@reddit
Ipv8 draft has been released
yawara25@reddit
So what? Anyone can release a draft. I can release an IPv10 draft. That's 2 more IPs.
xcorv42@reddit
You need some technical level I suppose
randomdestructn@reddit
Yes but no but
https://lowendbox.com/blog/vibe-drafting-ietf-proposals-is-now-a-thing-the-ipv8-proposal/
SouthEastSmith@reddit
Does it address every atom in the multi-verse?
BaseProtector@reddit
mass adoption by 2057
Independent_Cat_5481@reddit
And yet my ISP still doesn't support it on residential connections
PaulWalkerTexasRangr@reddit
It genuinely is much more work to implement, compared to the simplicity of v4.
https://www.ripe.net/publications/docs/ripe-690/
Most customers are not informed enough to care, and when v6 breaks it's service-affecting even if v4 is still working. I understand why small providers with small engineer staff drag their feet.
miquels@reddit
I used to work at an ISP in .nl with a few hundred thousand customers, and around 15 years ago we enabled ipv6 by default. It just works and has been working for a long time. Anyone claiming today that ipv6 is not ready is more than 15 years behind.
randomdestructn@reddit
Even big ones. Bell Canada doesn't support it on residential connections.
Their main competitor, Rogers has had it for years.
But bell are the ones who offer FTTH, so that's what I have
schmerm@reddit
I had Bell FTTH and switched to TekSavvy fibre over the same connection. They gave me v6 no problem.
TheBendit@reddit
It is only more work when you have to dual stack. V6-only plus a v4 gateway is simpler than CG-NAT + stateful DHCP.
Dual stack is a pain, but until Windows 10 dies and every Windows 11 is on 26H2, it is unavoidable.
acdcfanbill@reddit
I'm at a university and we don't support ipv6 :)
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frankster@reddit
I recently set my laptop to ipv6 only and had a play to see what broke. Mostly tech type websites. GitHub not working was the biggest surprise.
https://mastodon.social/@wtfrank/116217583142628054
Cube00@reddit
I accidentally ran the same test by running up an IPv6 only VPS and was thinking why are all these sites blocked? Oh wait, they don't support IPv6, Noice!
AvidCyclist250@reddit
Really? I'm using ipv6 and didn't notice a difference.
TheG0AT0fAllTime@reddit
Placebo, there's no functional difference.
tajetaje@reddit
Unless you have truly awful IPv4 routing for some reason yeah
vip17@reddit
the number for China is weird, given the significant IPv6 ratio there. Probably because Google was banned in China
vip17@reddit
shouldn't this be posted on r/ipv6
TheTwelveYearOld@reddit (OP)
Someone else already did
graywolf0026@reddit
Well I must be weird.
LAN is v4, with the router holding v6.
... Mostly I just don't see a reason to run v6 internally on such a small service space.
vip17@reddit
for LAN-only access then IPv4 is fine, but if you want IPv6 internet access you'll need an IPv6 anyway
beefcat_@reddit
I'm going to celebrate by pouring myself a drink in support of our comrades stuck on IPv4 CGNAT ISPs
skyb0rg@reddit
Very happy for this! The internet was meant to be a peer-to-peer network, not something that requires clients and servers.
In Linux news, there are in-progress patches for an ipxlat kernel module that makes IPv6-mostly network much more feasible.
SouthEastSmith@reddit
Peer to Peer over the Internet? I dont think trust is going to come back into style.
Cruffe@reddit
Many services today are peer to peer, but require external servers like STUN to faciliate the connection because one or (likely) both peers are behind NAT. If the NAT is really bad it requires TURN, which basically means sending everything through an external server. Very inefficient.
NAT isn't even a security feature, it's a workaround to the limitations of IPv4 that causes issues, which requires other workarounds.
Firewall takes care of security, it's not like your device is wide open to the internet when you're using IPv6. You just skip all the other complicated bullshit necessary only because NAT complicates it.
triemdedwiat@reddit
It is not NAT that is the problem/ It is maintaining a firewall on every machine on IPv6.
Megame50@reddit
You don't need to do that either. Every dual-stack residential network will have a stateful firewall for v6 just as it does for v4.
Cruffe@reddit
Every IPv6 capable router I've had came with IPv6 firewall enabled and set to drop all inbound connections to the entire network by default.
While every device has their own publicly routable IP addresses, part of that route is still through one point, your router. That firewall protects everything on the IPv6 subnet. From that you can make exceptions if you do want to accept inbound connections to some port on some host, similar to port forwarding. Otherwise it's just as blocked from unwanted traffic as an IPv4 network.
Any type of device you'd connect to various other networks should have firewall on it regardless, for IPv4 and IPv6.
ElePHPant666@reddit
I'm excited to try v6-mostly once there is better support for nat64 on linux (and I move so I can have better ISP and can stop with NAT66). I tried running my servers vlan as v6-mostly but dealing with destination NAT46 caused some problems so I kept the dual stack network.
SalaciousSubaru@reddit
As far as I know there won’t ever be NAT64 support in z Linux
skyb0rg@reddit
If you’re referring to the “provider-side” of the translator, you can implement it in terms of the stateless ipxlat driver by running NAT66 followed by ipxlat.
ElePHPant666@reddit
There already is but as 3rd-party kernel modules such as Jool and userspace tun drivers such as Tayga. It seems to work fine in my testing for outbound but inbound NAT 4->6 caused more trouble than it was worth.
MatchingTurret@reddit
That's kinda true. But mostly because at the beginning every computer was basically a server with dumb terminals.
StrangerInsideMyHead@reddit
Never thought I’d see the day. This makes me happy :)
Cruffe@reddit
My phone carrier doesn't use IPv6 and it pisses me off a little. I get CG-NAT IPv4 only.
My home network does get IPv6, a static /48 prefix in fact, giving me more /64 subnets than I could ever need. I run dual-stack not because I want to, but because I have to. I would drop IPv4 entirely if I could, but too much of the internet is IPv4 only.
My home network solves the phone carrier issue though. I'm using WireGuard to my home network, giving my phone a real IPv6 from that home prefix and routing me onto the internet. I can do this because thankfully my ISP grants me a public IPv4 address allowing my phone to connect to my server. Although it's a dynamic IP of course.
Many networking things would be a lot simpler without IPv4 and the many complicated workarounds necessary with the limited address pool.
_SeKeLuS_@reddit
Ipv6 is not even avaible in city
TheTwelveYearOld@reddit (OP)
avaible
cbarrick@reddit
And Android still doesn't support DHCPv6
DragonSlayerC@reddit
What's wrong with SLAAC?
cbarrick@reddit
I can't assign a static IP to my phone.
More seriously, in an enterprise environment, stateful and predictable address assignment is nice. Also, AFAIK, SLAAC can't assign everything that DHCP can, like domain names.
It's not that big of a deal. But like, it's been ages. It's not that they can't support it; it's that they intentionally choose not to. Which is annoying.
AvidCyclist250@reddit
That was me.
NamedBird@reddit
A good time to make Linux compilable with IPv6-only options!
(Right now, you still need IPv4 to have IPv6. Ew! ;-)
longdarkfantasy@reddit
Get ready for the ipv8
Megame50@reddit
It's not Linux users, though: https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=http&groupBy=ip_version&filters=os%253DLinux&dt=2026-01-18_2026-04-12.
According to cloudflare's tracker, which counts HTTP requests to cloudflare services, Linux has the worst IPv6 adoption rate, behind Windows, which is behind MacOS.
I'm even willing to be some of you clowns reading this right now have ipv6.disable=1 set.
QliXeD@reddit
And we start to work on IPv8 specs!
bcredeur97@reddit
But I still don’t care for it, NAT works great and reverse proxies cut down on IP waste.
beankylla@reddit
How much of the ipv6 stack is Ai though? 😅
tchernobog84@reddit
5G is quite a bit of that numbers, tbh, since it requires IPv6
res13echo@reddit
Super great timing. IETF just announced their draft for IPv8 which is purpose built to get the IPv4 hold outs to finally come to 64bit because it's fully backwards compatible with IPv4 without requiring dual stack. It's going to be hard to say no to IPv8 if you're still stuck on IPv4.
Kind of feels like IPv8 will soon make IPv6 rollout efforts look like they were a waste of time.
SkiFire13@reddit
IETF did not announce or endore it in any way. Anyone can publish a draft on the IETF.
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-thain-ipv8/
It has the exact same drawbacks as IPv6. It has a different addressing scheme and a different packet structure. 8to4 is claimed to be a way to obtain backward compatibility but 6to4 already exists and does the same thing for IPv6.
This just an April fool published a couple of weeks too late.
butwhyorwhere@reddit
Just to write it down: IETF did not announce anything. What you saw is a draft, and means exactly nothing. And a third standard, that tbh reads as if its ai-slop, will solve exactly nothing besides split everything further. Also rofl at the "OAuth2 JWT" mix-in to the network protocol.
mogoh@reddit
I would celebrate, but TBH the increase stagnated for about a year.