I’ve been pretty negative recently in my posts here (I would argue justifiably, though that’s neither here nor there at the moment), but I want to take a moment to offer well deserved praise and give credit where credit is due. So: THANK YOU MikroTik (genuinely) for FINALLY getting around to implementing IPv6 Fastpath/Fasttrack support. The lack of this has been a HUGE showstopper in doing a major IPv6 push to most of our end-users, since we have deployed a LOT of RouterBOARDs to customers as CPE. And prior to this, IPv6 forwarding performance was notably worse than IPv4 (which has had FP/FT for forever now). However… My experience has been largely the same as most others here with 7.18(.2), which is that I can get IPv6 Fast TRACK to work great, but Fast PATH does not seem to work. Now, perhaps this is completely a cosmetic/reporting bug, and IPv6 Fastpath actually works just fine; I have not yet taken time to measure actual performance to see if that is the case. But, if I have IPv6 connection tracking turned off, zero IPv6 filter/NAT/mangle rules defined, and ‘/ipv6/settings/allow-fast-path=yes’, then it will show ‘ipv6-fast-path-active: yes’, BUT the ‘ipv6-fast-path-packets’ and ‘ipv6-fast-path-bytes’ counters do NOT budge from 0 at all . If this is just a cosmetic bug, it’s very different from the one afflicting IPv4 FP/FT in 7.18, where Fasttrack works and the counters count up, but it says ‘ipv4-fasttrack-packets: NO’. I understand this reporting error is fixed in 7.19beta. I haven’t been super bothered by (apparent) lack of working IPv6 Fastpath in 7.18.x, since we are largely deploying this on customer CPE where it’s pretty important to have some common-sense firewall rules in place, so IPv6 connection tracking has to be on, and thus we take advantage of Fasttrack instead, which seems to work fine. But since Fastpath is supposed to be a headlining feature, and since it would be nice to see this working properly on, say, CCR hardware that’s sitting on our network and forwarding IPv6 traffic to end-users, I am adding my “me too” to this report. (And if IPv6 Fasttrack works but Fastpath doesn’t, that is kind of a shocking thing to have slide through the QA for this 7.18 release, where IPv6 Fastpath was pretty heavily promoted. Like, how does such a bug not get caught on the way out the door…)
