History

From late 2008 through 2009, People like Holger and I were working on bs11-abis and later OpenBSC only in our spare time. The name Osmocom didn't even exist back then. There was a strong technical community with contributions from Sylvain Munaut, Andreas Eversberg, Daniel Willmann, Jan Luebbe and a few others. None of this would have been possible if it wasn't for all the help we got from Dieter Spaar with the BS-11 [2]. We all had our dayjob in other places, and OpenBSC work was really just a hobby. People were working on it, because it was where no FOSS hacker has gone before. It was cool. It was a big and pleasant challenge to enter the closed telecom space as pure autodidacts.

Holger and I were doing freelance contract development work on Open Source projects for many years before. I was mostly doing Linux related contracting, while Holger has been active in all kinds of areas throughout the FOSS software stack.

In 2010, Holger and I saw some first interest by companies into OpenBSC, including Netzing AG and On-Waves ehf. So we were able to spend at least some of our paid time on OpenBSC/Osmocom related contract work, and were thus able to do less other work. We also continued to spend tons of spare time in bringing Osmocom forward. Also, the amount of contract work we did was only a fraction of the many more hours of spare time.

In 2011, Holger and I decided to start the company sysmocom in order to generate more funding for the Osmocom GSM projects by means of financing software development by product sales. So rather than doing freelance work for companies who bought their BTS hardware from other places (and spent huge amounts of cash on that), we decided that we wanted to be a full solution supplier, who can offer a complete product based on all hardware and software required to run small GSM networks.

The only problem is: We still needed an actual BTS for that. Through some reverse engineering of existing products we figured out who one of the ODM suppliers for the hardware + PHY layer was, and decided to develop the OsmoBTS software to do so. We inherited some of the early code from work done by Andreas Eversberg on the jolly/bts branch of OsmocomBB (thanks), but much was missing at the time.

What follows was Holger and me working several years for free [3], without any salary, in order to complete the OsmoBTS software, build an embedded Linux distribution around it based on OE/poky, write documentation, etc. and complete the first sysmocom product: The sysmoBTS 1002

We did that not because we want to get rich, or because we want to run a business. We did it simply because we saw an opportunity to generate funding for the Osmocom projects and make them more sustainable and successful. And because we believe there is a big, gaping, huge vacuum in terms of absence of FOSS in the cellular telecom sphere.

Funding by means of sysmocom product sales

Once we started to sell the sysmoBTS products, we were able to fund Osmocom related development from the profits made on hardware / full-system product sales. Every single unit sold made a big contribution towards funding both the maintenance as well as the ongoing development on new features.

This source of funding continues to be an important factor today.

Funding by means of R&D contracts

The probably best and most welcome method of funding Osmocom related work is by means of R&D projects in which a customer funds our work to extend the Osmocom GSM stack in one particular area where he has a particular need that the existing code cannot fulfill yet.

This kind of project is the ideal match, as it shows where the true strength of FOSS is: Each of those customers did not have to fund the development of a GSM stack from scratch. Rather, they only had to fund those bits that were missing for their particular application.

Our reference for this is and has been On-Waves, who have been funding development of their required features (and bug fixing etc.) since 2010.

We've of course had many other projects from a variety of customers over over the years. Last, but not least, we had a customer who willingly co-funded (together with funds from NLnet foundation and lots of unpaid effort by sysmocom) the 3G/3.5G support in the Osmocom stack.

The problem here is:

• we have not been able to secure anywhere nearly as many of those R&D projects within the cellular industry, despite believing we have a very good foundation upon which we can built. I've been writing many exciting technical project proposals
• you almost exclusively get funding only for new features. But it's very hard to get funding for the core maintenance work. The bug-fixing, code review, code refactoring, testing, etc.

So as a result, the profit margin you have on selling R&D projects is basically used to (do a bad job of) fund those bits and pieces that nobody wants to pay for.

Funding by means of customer support

There is a way to generate funding for development by providing support services. We've had some success with this, but primarily alongside the actual hardware/system sales - not so much in terms of pure software-only support.

Also, providing support services from a R&D company means:

• either you distract your developers by handling support inquiries. This means they will have less time to work on actual code, and likely get side tracked by too many issues that make it hard to focus
• or you have to hire separate support staff. This of course means that the size of the support business has to be sufficiently large to not only cover the cots of hiring + training support staff, but also still generate funding for the actual software R&D.

We've tried shortly with the second option, but fallen back to the first for now. There's simply not sufficient user/admin type support business to rectify dedicated staff for that.

Funding by means of cross-subsizing from other business areas

sysmocom also started to do some non-Osmocom projects in order to generate revenue that we can feed again into Osmocom projects. I'm not at liberty to discuss them in detail, but basically we've been doing pretty much anything from

• custom embedded Linux board designs
• M2M devices with GSM modems
• consulting gigs
• public tendered research projects

Profits from all those areas went again into Osmocom development.

Last, but not least, we also operate the sysmocom webshop. The profit we make on those products also is again immediately re-invested into Osmocom development.

Funding by grants

We've had some success in securing funding from NLnet Foundation for specific features. While this is useful, the size of their projects grants of up to EUR 30k is not a good fit for the scale of the tasks we have at hand inside Osmocom. You may think that's a considerable amount of money? Well, that translates to 2-3 man-months of work at a bare cost-covering rate. At a team size of 6 developers, you would theoretically have churned through that in two weeks. Also, their focus is (understandably) on Internet and IT security, and not so much cellular communications.

There are of course other options for grants, such as government research grants and the like. However, they require long-term planning, they require you to match (i.e. pay yourself) a significant portion, and basically mandate that you hire one extra person for doing all the required paperwork and reporting. So all in all, not a particularly attractive option for a very small company consisting of die hard engineers.

Funding by more BTS ports

At sysmocom, we've been doing some ports of the OsmoBTS + OsmoPCU software to other hardware, and supporting those other BTS vendors with porting, R&D and support services.

If sysmocom was a classic BTS vendor, we would not help our "competition". However, we are not. sysmocom exists to help Osmocom, and we strongly believe in open systems and architectures, without a single point of failure, a single supplier for any component or any type of vendor lock-in.

So we happily help third parties to get Osmocom running on their hardware, either with a proprietary PHY or with OsmoTRX.

However, we expect that those BTS vendors also understand their responsibility to share the development and maintenance effort of the stack. Preferably by dedicating some of their own staff to work in the Osmocom community. Alternatively, sysmocom can perform that work as paid service. But that's a double-edged sword: We don't want to be a single point of failure.

Osmocom funding outside of sysmocom

Osmocom is of course more than sysmocom. Even for the cellular infrastructure projects inside Osmocom is true: They are true, community-based, open, collaborative development projects. Anyone can contribute.

Over the years, there have been code contributions by e.g. Fairwaves. They, too, build GSM base station hardware and use that as a means to not only recover the R&D on the hardware, but also to contribute to Osmocom. At some point a few years ago, there was a lot of work from them in the area of OsmoTRX, OsmoBTS and OsmoPCU. Unfortunately, in more recent years, they have not been able to keep up the level of contributions.

There are other companies engaged in activities with and around Osmcoom. There's Rhizomatica, an NGO helping indigenous communities to run their own cellular networks. They have been funding some of our efforts, but being an NGO helping rural regions in developing countries, they of course also don't have the deep pockets. Ideally, we'd want to be the ones contributing to them, not the other way around.

State of funding

We're making some progress in securing funding from players we cannot name [4] during recent years. We're also making occasional progress in convincing BTS suppliers to chip in their share. Unfortunately there are more who don't live up to their responsibility than those who do. I might start calling them out by name one day. The wider community and the public actually deserves to know who plays by FOSS rules and who doesn't. That's not shaming, it's just stating bare facts.

Which brings us to:

• sysmocom is in an office that's actually too small for the team, equipment and stock. But we certainly cannot afford more space.
• we cannot pay our employees what they could earn working at similar positions in other companies. So working at sysmocom requires dedication to the cause :)
• Holger and I have invested way more time than we have ever paid us, even more so considering the opportunity cost of what we would have earned if we'd continued our freelance Open Source hacker path
• we're [just barely] managing to pay for 6 developers dedicated to Osmocom development on our payroll based on the various funding sources indicated above

Nevertheless, I doubt that any such a small team has ever implemented an end-to-end GSM/GPRS/EGPRS network from RAN to Core at comparative feature set. My deepest respects to everyone involved. The big task now is to make it sustainable.

Summary

So as you can see, there's quite a bit of funding around. However, it always falls short of what's needed to implement all parts properly, and even not quite sufficient to keep maintaining the status quo in a proper and tested way. That can often be frustrating (mostly to us but sometimes also to users who run into regressions and oter bugs). There's so much more potential. So many things we wanted to add or clean up for a long time, but too little people interested in joining in, helping out - financially or by writing code.

On thing that is often a challenge when dealing with traditional customers: We are not developing a product and then selling a ready-made product. In fact, in FOSS this would be more or less suicidal: We'd have to invest man-years upfront, but then once it is finished, everyone can use it without having to partake in that investment.

So instead, the FOSS model requires the customers/users to chip in early during the R&D phase, in order to then subsequently harvest the fruits of that.

I think the lack of a FOSS mindset across the cellular / telecom industry is the biggest constraining factor here. I've seen that some 20-15 years ago in the Linux world. Trust me, it takes a lot of dedication to the cause to endure this lack of comprehension so many years later.

The lack of basic FOSS understanding in Telecom

Given that the Free and Open Source movement has been around at least since the 1980ies, it puzzles me that people still seem to have such fundamental misconceptions about it.

Something that really triggered me was an article at LightReading [1] which quotes Ulf Ewaldsson, a leading Ericsson excecutive with

"I have yet to understand why we would open source something we think is really good software"

This completely misses the point. FOSS is not about making a charity donation of a finished product to the planet.

FOSS is about sharing the development costs among multiple players, and avoiding that everyone has to reimplement the wheel. Macro-Economically, it is complete and utter nonsense that each 3GPP specification gets implemented two dozens of times, by at least a dozen of different entities. As a result, products are way more expensive than needed.

If large Telco players (whether operators or equipment manufacturers) were to collaboratively develop code just as much as they collaboratively develop the protocol specifications, there would be no need for replicating all of this work.

As a result, everyone could produce cellular network elements at reduced cost, sharing the R&D expenses, and competing in key areas, such as who can come up with the most energy-efficient implementation, or can produce the most reliable hardware, the best receiver sensitivity, the best and most fair scheduling implementation, or whatever else. But some 80% of the code could probably be shared, as e.g. encoding and decoding messages according to a given publicly released 3GPP specification document is not where those equipment suppliers actually compete.

So my dear cellular operator executives: Next time you're cursing about the prohibitively expensive pricing that your equipment suppliers quote you: You only have to pay that much because everyone is reimplementing the wheel over and over again.

Equally, my dear cellular infrastructure suppliers: You are all dying one by one, as it's hard to develop everything from scratch. Over the years, many of you have died. One wonders, if we might still have more players left, if some of you had started to cooperate in developing FOSS at least in those areas where you're not competing. You could replicate what Linux is doing in the operating system market. There's no need in having a phalanx of different proprietary flavors of Unix-like OSs. It's way too expansive, and it's not an area in which most companies need to or want to compete anyway.

Management Summary

You don't first develop and entire product until it is finished and then release it as open source. This makes little economic sense in a lot of cases, as you've already invested into developing 100% of it. Instead, you actually develop a new product collaboratively as FOSS in order to not have to invest 100% but maybe only 30% or even less. You get a multitude of your R&D investment back, because you're not only getting your own code, but all the other code that other community members implemented. You of course also get other benefits, such as peer review of the code, more ideas (not all bright people work inside one given company), etc.

Chapter 0: Problem Statement

In an all-IP GSM network, where we use Abis, A and other interfaces within the cellular network over IP transport, the audio of voice calls is transported inside RTP frames. The codec payload in those RTP frames is the actual codec frame of the respective cellular voice codec. In GSM, there are four relevant codecs: FR, HR, EFR and AMR.

Every so often during the (meanwhile many years of ) development of Osmocom cellular infrastructure software it would have been useful to be able to quickly play back the audio for analysis of given issues.

However, until now we didn't have that capability. The reason is relatively simple: In Osmocom, we genally don't do transcoding but simply pass the voice codec frames from left to right. They're only transcoded inside the phones or inside some external media gateway (in case of larger networks).

Chapter 1: GSM Audio Pocket Knife

Back in 2010, when we were very actively working on OsmocomBB, the telephone-side GSM protocol stack implementation, Sylvain Munaut wrote the GSM Audio Pocket Knife (gapk) in order to be able to convert between different formats (representations) of codec frames. In cellular communcations, everyoe is coming up with their own representation for the codec frames: The way they look on E1 as a TRAU frame is completely different from how RTP payload looks like, or what the TI Calypso DSP uses internally, or what a GSM Tester like the Racal 61x3 uses. The differences are mostly about data types used, bit-endinanness as well as padding and headers. And of course those different formats exist for each of the four codecs :/

In 2013 I first added simplistic RTP support for FR-GSM to gapk, which was sufficient for my debugging needs back then. Still, you had to save the decoded PCM output to a file and play that back, or use a pipe into aplay.

Last week, I picked up this subject again and added a long series of patches to gapk:

• support for variable-length codec frames (required for AMR support)
• support for AMR codec encode/decode using libopencore-amrnb
• support of all known RTP payload formats for all four codecs
• support for direct live playback to a sound card via ALSA

All of the above can now be combined to make GAPK bind to a specified UDP port and play back the RTP codec frames that anyone sends to that port using a command like this:

$ gapk -I 0.0.0.0/30000 -f rtp-amr -A default -g rawpcm-s16le

I've also merged a chance to OsmoBSC/OsmoNITB which allows the administrator to re-direct the voice of any active voice channel towards a user-specified IP address and port. Using that you can simply disconnect the voice stream from its normal destination and play back the audio via your sound card.

Chapter 2: Bugs in OsmoBTS GSM-HR

While going through the exercise of implementing the above extension to gapk, I had lots of trouble to get it to work for GSM-HR.

After some more digging, it seems there are two conflicting specification on how to format the RTP payload for half-rate GSM:

• ETSI TS 101 318 from 1998
• IETF RFC 5993 from 2010

In Osmocom, we claim to implement RFC5993, but it turned out that (at least) osmo-bts-sysmo (for sysmoBTS) was actually implementing the ETSI format instead.

And even worse, osmo-bts-sysmo gets event the ETSI format wrong. Each of the codec parameters (which are unaligned bit-fields) are in the wrong bit-endianness :(

Both the above were coincidentially also discovered by Sylvain Munaut during operating of the 32C3 GSM network in December 2015 and resulted the two following "work around" patches: * HACK for HR * HACK: Fix the bit order in HR frames

Those merely worked around those issues in the rtp_proxy of OsmoNITB, rather than addressing the real issue. That's ok, they were "quick" hacks to get something working at all during a four-day conference. I'm now working on "real" fixes in osmo-bts-sysmo. The devil is of course in the details, when people upgrade one BTS but not the other and want to inter-operate, ...

It yet remains to be investigated how osmo-bts-trx and other osmo-bts ports behave in this regard.

Chapter 3: Conclusions

Most definitely it is once again a very clear sign that more testing is required. It's tricky to see even wih osmo-gsm-tester, as GSM-HR works between two phones or even two instances of osmo-bts-sysmo, as both sides of the implementation have the same (wrong) understanding of the spec.

Given that we can only catch this kind of bug together with the hardware (the DSP runs the PHY code), pure unit tests wouldn't catch it. And the end-to-end test is also not very well suited to it. It seems to call for something in betewen. Something like an A-bis interface level test.

We need more (automatic) testing. I cannot say that often enough. The big challenge is how to convince contributors and customers that they should invest their time and money there, rather than yet-another (not automatically tested) feature?

Overhyped Docker missing the most basic features

I've always been extremely skeptical of suddenly emerging over-hyped technologies, particularly if they advertise to solve problems by adding yet another layer to systems that are already sufficiently complex themselves.

There are of course many issues with containers, ranging from replicated system libraries and the basic underlying statement that you're giving up on the system packet manager to properly deal with dependencies.

I'm also highly skeptical of FOSS projects that are primarily driven by one (VC funded?) company. Especially if their offering includes a so-called cloud service which they can stop to operate at any given point in time, or (more realistically) first get everybody to use and then start charging for.

But well, despite all the bad things I read about it over the years, on one day in May 2017 I finally thought let's give it a try. My problem to solve as a test balloon is fairly simple.

My basic use case

The plan is to start OsmoSTP, the m3ua-testtool and the sua-testtool, which both connect to OsmoSTP. By running this setup inside containers and inside an internal network, we could then execute the entire testsuite e.g. during jenkins test without having IP address or port number conflicts. It could even run multiple times in parallel on one buildhost, verifying different patches as part of the continuous integration setup.

This application is not so complex. All it needs is three containers, an internal network and some connections in between. Should be a piece of cake, right?

But enter the world of buzzword-fueled web-4000.0 software-defined virtualised and orchestrated container NFW + SDN vodoo: It turns out to be impossible, at least not with the preferred tools they advertise.

Dockerfiles

The part that worked relatively easily was writing a few Dockerfiles to build the actual containers. All based on debian:jessie from the library.

As m3ua-testsuite is written in guile, and needs to build some guile plugin/extension, I had to actually include guile-2.0-dev and other packages in the container, making it a bit bloated.

I couldn't immediately find a nice example Dockerfile recipe that would allow me to build stuff from source outside of the container, and then install the resulting binaries into the container. This seems to be a somewhat weak spot, where more support/infrastructure would be helpful. I guess the idea is that you simply install applications via package feeds and apt-get. But I digress.

So after some tinkering, I ended up with three docker containers:

• one running OsmoSTP
• one running m3ua-testtool
• one running sua-testtool

I also managed to create an internal bridged network between the containers, so the containers could talk to one another.

However, I have to manually start each of the containers with ugly long command line arguments, such as docker run --network sigtran --ip 172.18.0.200 -it osmo-stp-master. This is of course sub-optimal, and what Docker Services + Stacks should resolve.

Services + Stacks

The idea seems good: A service defines how a given container is run, and a stack defines multiple containers and their relation to each other. So it should be simple to define a stack with three services, right?

Well, it turns out that it is not. Docker documents that you can configure a static ipv4_address [1] for each service/container, but it seems related configuration statements are simply silently ignored/discarded [2], [3], [4].

This seems to be related that for some strange reason stacks can (at least in later versions of docker) only use overlay type networks, rather than the much simpler bridge networks. And while bridge networks appear to support static IP address allocations, overlay apparently doesn't.

I still have a hard time grasping that something that considers itself a serious product for production use (by a company with estimated value over a billion USD, not by a few hobbyists) that has no support for running containers on static IP addresses. that. How many applications out there have I seen that require static IP address configuration? How much simpler do setups get, if you don't have to rely on things like dynamic DNS updates (or DNS availability at all)?

So I'm stuck with having to manually configure the network between my containers, and manually starting them by clumsy shell scripts, rather than having a proper abstraction for all of that. Well done :/

Exposing Ports

Unrelated to all of the above: If you run some software inside containers, you will pretty soon want to expose some network services from containers. This should also be the most basic task on the planet.

However, it seems that the creators of docker live in the early 1980ies, where only TCP and UDP transport protocols existed. They seem to have missed that by the late 1990ies to early 2000s, protocols like SCTP or DCCP were invented.

But yet, in 2017, Docker chooses to

• blindly assume TCP in https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/builder/#expose without even mentioning it (or designing the syntax to accept any specification of the protocol)
• design a syntax (/tcp) in the command-line parsing (see https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/run/#expose-incoming-ports), but then only parse tcp and udp, despite people requesting support for other protocols like SCTP as early as three years ago

Now some of the readers may think 'who uses SCTP anyway'. I will give you a straight answer: Everyone who has a mobile phone uses SCTP. This is due to the fact that pretty much all the connections inside cellular networks (at least for 3G/4G networks, and in reality also for many 2G networks) are using SCTP as underlying transport protocol, from the radio access network into the core network. So every time you switch your phone on, or do anything with it, you are using SCTP. Not on your phone itself, but by all the systems that form the network that you're using. And with the drive to C-RAN, NFV, SDN and all the other buzzwords also appearing in the Cellular Telecom field, people should actually worry about it, if they want to be a part of the software stack that is used in future cellular telecom systems.

Summary

After spending the better part of a day to do something that seemed like the most basic use case for running three networked containers using Docker, I'm back to step one: Most likely inventing some custom scripts based on unshare to run my three test programs in a separate network namespace for isolated execution of test suite execution as part of a Jenkins CI setup :/

It's also clear that Docker apparently don't care much about playing a role in the Cellular Telecom world, which is increasingly moving away from proprietary and hardware-based systems (like STPs) to virtualised, software-based systems.

Observations on SCTP and Linux

When I was still doing Linux kernel work with netfilter/iptables in the early 2000's, I was somebody who actually regularly had a look at the new RFCs that came out. So I saw the SCTP RFCs, SIGTRAN RFCs, SIP and RTP, etc. all released during those years. I was quite happy to see that for new protocols like SCTP and later DCCP, Linux quickly received a mainline implementation.

Now most people won't have used SCTP so far, but it is a protocol used as transport layer in a lot of telecom protocols for more than a decade now. Virtually all protocols that have traditionally been spoken over time-division multiplex E1/T1 links have been migrated over to SCTP based protocol stackings.

Working on various Open Source telecom related projects, i of course come into contact with SCTP every so often. Particularly some years back when implementing the Erlang SIGTAN code in erlang/osmo_ss7 and most recently now with the introduction of libosmo-sigtran with its OsmoSTP, both part of the libosmo-sccp repository.

I've also hard to work with various proprietary telecom equipment over the years. Whether that's some eNodeB hardware from a large brand telecom supplier, or whether it's a MSC of some other vendor. And they all had one thing in common: Nobody seemed to use the Linux kernel SCTP code. They all used proprietary implementations in userspace, using RAW sockets on the kernel interface.

I always found this quite odd, knowing that this is the route that you have to take on proprietary OSs without native SCTP support, such as Windows. But on Linux? Why? Based on rumors, people find the Linux SCTP implementation not mature enough, but hard evidence is hard to come by.

As much as it pains me to say this, the kind of Linux SCTP bugs I have seen within the scope of our work on Osmocom seem to hint that there is at least some truth to this (see e.g. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1308360 or https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1308362).

Sure, software always has bugs and will have bugs. But we at Osmocom are 10-15 years "late" with our implementations of higher-layer protocols compared to what the mainstream telecom industry does. So if we find something, and we find it even already during R&D of some userspace code, not even under load or in production, then that seems a bit unsettling.

One would have expected, with all their market power and plenty of Linux-based devices in the telecom sphere, why did none of those large telecom suppliers invest in improving the mainline Linux SCTP code? I mean, they all use UDP and TCP of the kernel, so it works for most of the other network protocols in the kernel, but why not for SCTP? I guess it comes back to the fundamental lack of understanding how open source development works. That it is something that the given industry/user base must invest in jointly.

The leatest discovered bug

During the last months, I have been implementing SCCP, SUA, M3UA and OsmoSTP (A Signal Transfer Point). They were required for an effort to add 3GPP compliant A-over-IP to OsmoBSC and OsmoMSC.

For quite some time I was seeing some erratic behavior when at some point the STP would not receive/process a given message sent by one of the clients (ASPs) connected. I tried to ignore the problem initially until the code matured more and more, but the problems remained.

It became even more obvious when using Michael Tuexen's m3ua-testtool, where sometimes even the most basic test cases consisting of sending + receiving a single pair of messages like ASPUP -> ASPUP_ACK was failing. And when the test case was re-tried, the problem often disappeared.

Also, whenever I tried to observe what was happening by meas of strace, the problem would disappear completely and never re-appear until strace was detached.

Of course, given that I've written several thousands of lines of new code, it was clear to me that the bug must be in my code. Yesterday I was finally prepare to accept that it might actually be a Linux SCTP bug. Not being able to reproduce that problem on a FreeBSD VM also pointed clearly into this direction.

Now I could simply have collected some information and filed a bug report (which some kernel hackers at RedHat have thankfully invited me to do!), but I thought my use case was too complex. You would have to compile a dozen of different Osmocom libraries, configure the STP, run the scheme-language m3ua-testtool in guile, etc. - I guess nobody would have bothered to go that far.

So today I tried to implement a test case that reproduced the problem in plain C, without any external dependencies. And for many hours, I couldn't make the bug to show up. I tried to be as close as possible to what was happening in OsmoSTP: I used non-blocking mode on client and server, used the SCTP_NODELAY socket option, used the sctp_rcvmsg() library wrapper to receive events, but the bug was not reproducible.

Some hours later, it became clear that there was one setsockopt() in OsmoSTP (actually, libosmo-netif) which enabled all existing SCTP events. I did this at the time to make sure OsmoSTP has the maximum insight possible into what's happening on the SCTP transport layer, such as address fail-overs and the like.

As it turned out, adding that setsockopt for SCTP_FLAGS to my test code made the problem reproducible. After playing around which of the flags, it seems that enabling the SENDER_DRY_EVENT flag makes the bug appear.

You can find my detailed report about this issue in https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1442784 and a program to reproduce the issue at http://people.osmocom.org/laforge/sctp-nonblock/sctp-dry-event.c

Inside the Osmocom world, luckily we can live without the SENDER_DRY_EVENT and a corresponding work-around has been submitted and merged as https://gerrit.osmocom.org/#/c/2386/

With that work-around in place, suddenly all the m3ua-testtool and sua-testtool test cases are reliably green (PASSED) and OsmoSTP works more smoothly, too.

What do we learn from this?

Free Software in the Telecom sphere is getting too little attention. This is true even those small portions of telecom relevant protocols that ended up in the kernel like SCTP or more recently the GTP module I co-authored. They are getting too little attention in development, even more lack of attention in maintenance, and people seem to focus more on not using it, rather than fixing and maintaining what is there.

It makes me really sad to see this. Telecoms is such a massive industry, with billions upon billions of revenue for the classic telecom equipment vendors. Surely, they would be able to co-invest in some basic infrastructure like proper and reliable testing / continuous integration for SCTP. More recently, we see millions and more millions of VC cash burned by buzzword-flinging companies doing "NFV" and "SDN". But then rather reimplement network stacks in userspace than to fix, complete and test those little telecom infrastructure components which we have so far, like the SCTP protocol :(

Where are the contributions to open source telecom parts from Ericsson, Nokia (former NSN), Huawei and the like? I'm not even dreaming about the actual applications / network elements, but merely the maintenance of something as basic as SCTP. To be fair, Motorola was involved early on in the Linux SCTP code, and Huawei contributed a long series of fixes in 2013/2014. But that's not the kind of long-term maintenance contribution that one would normally expect from the primary interest group in SCTP.

Finally, let me thank to the Linux SCTP maintainers. I'm not complaining about them! They're doing a great job, given the arcane code base and the fact that they are not working for a company that has SCTP based products as their core business. I'm sure the would love more support and contributions from the Telecom world, too.

OsmoCon 2017 Schedule

The list of talks for OsmoCon 2017 has been available for quite some weeks, but today we finally published the first actual schedule.

As you can see, the day is fully packed with talks about Osmocom cellular infrastructure projects. We had to cut some talk slots short (30min instead of 45min), but I'm confident that it is good to cover a wider range of topics, while at the same time avoiding fragmenting the audience with multiple tracks.

OsmoCon 2017 Travel Grants

We are happy to announce that we have received donations to permit for providing travel grants!

This means that any attendee who is otherwise not able to cover their travel to OsmoCon 2017 (e.g. because their interest in Osmocom is not related to their work, or because their employer doesn't pay the travel expenses) can now apply for such a travel grant.

For more details see OsmoCon 2017 Travel Grants and/or contact osmocon2017@sysmocom.de.

OsmoCon 2017 Social Event

Tech Talks are nice and fine, but what many people enjoy even more at conferences is the informal networking combined with good food. For this, we have the social event at night, which is open to all attendees.

See more details about it at OsmoCon 2017 Social Event.

History

When people like Dieter, Holger and I started to play with what later became OpenBSC, it was just for fun. A challenge to master. A closed world to break open and which to attack with the tools, the mindset and the values that we brought with us.

Later, Holger and I started to do freelance development for commercial users of Osmocom (initially basically only OpenBSC, but then OsmoSGSN, OsmoBSC, OsmoBTS, OsmoPCU and all the other bits on the infrastructure side). This lead to the creation of sysmocom in 2011, and ever since we are trying to use revenue from hardware sales as well as development contracts to subsidize and grow the Osmocom projects. We're investing most of our earnings directly into more staff that in turn works on Osmocom related projects.

In order to do this, I basically gave up my previous career[s] in IT security and Linux kernel development (as well as put things like gpl-violations.org on hold). This is a big price to pay for crating more FOSS in the mobile communications world, and sometimes I'm a bit melancholic about the "old days" before.

Financial wealth is clearly not my primary motivation, but let me be honest: I could have easily earned a shitload of money continuing to do freelance Linux kernel development, IT security or related consulting. There's a lot of demand for related skills, particularly with some experience and reputation attached. But I decided against it, and worked several years without a salary (or almost none) on Osmocom related stuff [as did Holger].

But then, even with all the sacrifices made, and the amount of revenue we can direct from sysmocom into Osmocom development: The complexity of cellular infrastructure vs. the amount of funding and resources is always only a fraction of what one would normally want to have to do a proper implementation. So it's constant resource shortage, combined with lots of unpaid work on those areas that are on the immediate short-term feature list of customers, and that nobody else in the community feels like he wants to work on. And that can be a bit frustrating at times.

Is it worth it?

So after 7 years of OpenBSC, OsmocomBB and all the related projects, I'm sometimes asking myself whether it has been worth the effort, and whether it was the right choice.

It was right from the point that cellular technology is still an area that's obscure and unknown to many, and that has very little FOSS (though Improving!). At the same time, cellular networks are becoming more and more essential to many users and applications. So on an abstract level, I think that every step in the direction of FOSS for cellular is as urgently needed as before, and we have had quite some success in implementing many different protocols and network elements. Unfortunately, in most cases incompletely, as the amount of funding and/or resources were always extremely limited.

Satisfaction/Happiness

On the other hand, when it comes to metrics such as personal satisfaction or professional pride, I'm not very happy or satisfied. The community remains small, the commercial interest remains limited, and as opposed to the Linux world, most players have a complete lack of understanding that FOSS is not a one-way road, but that it is important for all stakeholders to contribute to the development in terms of development resources.

Project success?

I think a collaborative development project (which to me is what FOSS is about) is only then truly successful, if its success is not related to a single individual, a single small group of individuals or a single entity (company). And no matter how much I would like the above to be the case, it is not true for the Osmocom cellular infrastructure projects. Take away Holger and me, or take away sysmocom, and I think it would be pretty much dead. And I don't think I'm exaggerating here. This makes me sad, and after all these years, and after knowing quite a number of commercial players using our software, I would have hoped that the project rests on many more shoulders by now.

This is not to belittle the efforts of all the people contributing to it, whether the team of developers at sysmocom, whether those in the community that still work on it 'just for fun', or whether those commercial users that contract sysmocom for some of the work we do. Also, there are known and unknown donors/funders, like the NLnet foundation for some parts of the work. Thanks to all of you, and clearly we wouldn't be where we are now without all of that!

But I feel it's not sufficient for the overall scope, and it's not [yet] sustainable at this point. We need more support from all sides, particularly those not currently contributing. From vendors of BTSs and related equipment that use Osmocom components. From operators that use it. From individuals. From academia.

Yes, we're making progress. I'm happy about new developments like the Iu and Iuh support, the OsmoHLR/VLR split and 2G/3G authentication that Neels just blogged about. And there's progress on the SIMtrace2 firmware with card emulation and MITM, just as well as there's progress on libosmo-sigtran (with a more complete SUA, M3UA and connection-oriented SCCP stack), etc.

But there are too little people working on this, and those people are mostly coming from one particular corner, while most of the [commercial] users do not contribute the way you would expect them to contribute in collaborative FOSS projects. You can argue that most people in the Linux world also don't contribute, but then the large commercial beneficiaries (like the chipset and hardware makers) mostly do, as are the large commercial users.

All in all, I have the feeling that Osmocom is as important as it ever was, but it's not grown up yet to really walk on its own feet. It may be able to crawl, though ;)

So for now, don't panic. I'm not suffering from burn-out, mid-life crisis and I don't plan on any big changes of where I put my energy: It will continue to be Osmocom. But I also think we have to have a more open discussion with everyone on how to move beyond the current situation. There's no point in staying quiet about it, or to claim that everything is fine the way it is. We need more commitment. Not from the people already actively involved, but from those who are not [yet].

If that doesn't happen in the next let's say 1-2 years, I think it's fair that I might seriously re-consider in which field and in which way I'd like to dedicate my [I would think considerable] productive energy and focus.