Overview of the KAME Project

The KAME Project is a joint effort to create a single solid software set, especially targeting IPv6/IPsec. Talented researchers from several Japanese organizations joined the project. This joint effort will avoid unnecessary duplicated development in the same area, and effectively provide a high quality, advanced featured package.

The KAME Project aims to provide FREE reference implementations of

on BSD variants.

Currently several BSD variants are being developed including FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. They are developing/improving network code (sys/netinet tree) separately.

Heterogeneity is always important, but we did not have a single shared reference code for IPv6 networking when we started the project. In IPv4 days we had had a good reference implementation, such as UCB Network Releases. When considering to use IPv6, there had already been several choices. The problem here was, even if *BSD projects chose a single IPv6 stack to merge into themselves, the code would be maintained by each project separately and the code would likely be quite different on each project tree.

We thus formed this project to implement and maintain the best available code for IPv4/IPv6/IPsec/whatever, which would be the single base of advanced internetworking technologies.

The KAME project was started as a 2-year project (April 1998 - March 2000). It has got extension for 2 years several times, so will be until March 2006 at this moment.

The core researchers are (per organization, in alphabetical order):

The core researchers have committed to working on the project as the primary assignment at their organization (i.e., it is not a hobby for us). The most important task is to implement the best networking code possible, under the BSD copyright. Also note that we provide the achievement as Free software, since we are much interested in usage of this stack in many ways. Thus stability is one of the very important goals for us.

KAME's code is based on WIDE Hydrangea IPv6/IPsec stack. We are now merging several other codes provided by the above researchers, implementing and improving the software.


Available features

kernel:

Userland and others:


Roadmaps


Releases

There are two major sets of KAME-derived releases.

  1. KAME SNAP for hackers/researchers.
    KAME SNAPs (snapshots) include whole bunch of experimental items, and may not be stable (sometimes do not even compile). Snapshots are automatically generated every Monday without an explicit announcement. If a particular snapshot includes very important changes such as a security fix, or when a (subjectively) certain amount of changes are accumulated in snapshots, we will make an explicit notice at the snap-users mailing list.
  2. Integrated *BSD source code tree for normal users.
    You just need to install official releases from *BSD projects. The following official releases integrate the KAME kit:
    • FreeBSD 4.0 and beyond
    • NetBSD 1.5 and beyond
    • OpenBSD 2.7 and beyond
    • BSD/OS 4.2 and beyond (BSD/OS was discontinued, unfortunately)

A document named COVERAGE is supplied with KAME kits, and gives gory details about differences between KAME/*BSD and *BSD official releases.

In the past we had KAME STABLE and KAME RELEASE kits. They were discontinued.


Contacts

If you need to contact us, use the following routes:

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