Pocketbook devices (tested with a Pocketbook Era and a Pocketbook InkPad 3) seem to not support
IPv6 at all.
More and more ISPs are using native IPv6 for internet connections, tunnelling IPv4 over a NAT gateway. While solutions like NAT64 help IPv6-clients reach IPv4 destinations, it doesn't help anything for IPv4-clients like Pocketbook readers.
When I try to visit a page like
test-ipv6.com in the Browser on my Pocketbook Era, it doesn't seem to be using IPv6 at all; not even when the network signals to the client to finally use IPv6 instead of IPv4 (
RFC8925). When there's no IPv4 available in a network (only IPv6), there's either a timeout while connecting to the Wifi, or an error message like "Error obtaining IP address".
My readers aren't rooted so I can't check if IPv6 is "just" disabled in the Pocketbook software or if the whole Linux kernel has been compiled without IPv6 - but neither of which is something that should happen for new devices released in 2022. The Pocketbook doesn't seem to respond to pings to its link-local address, so either IPv6 is completely disabled, or the device deliberately blocks IPv6 pings and only allows IPv4 pings ...
Same goes, by the way, for most of Pocketbook's websites (and this very forum, but that's OT in this thread).
pocketbook-int.com, pocketbook.digital, pocketbook.ch, none of these have an IPv6 address. Only the german page pocketbook.de has a working IPv6 address (probably a Cloudflare proxy). Though these websites do work through a NAT64 so in my opinion, supporting IPv6 in the devices and their software is way more important than supporting IPv6 on the webpages.
Newer Tolino devices seem to support IPv6 (though I haven't personally verified that). Is there a particular reason IPv6 support is missing on even the newest Pocketbook devices, or is this yet another case of "hasn't been needed in the past" one often hears from vendors regarding IPv6 support?
Yes, right now all internet connections offer at least something like a CLAT to support these legacy devices not supporting IPv6, but I can imagine that in the next couple years there will be some ISPs shutting that down because all normal operating systems have long been supporting IPv6, and less and less devices are going to need a CLAT, just a PLAT/NAT64 to connect to an IPv4 destination. Pocketbook devices would stop working then.
Are there any plans of future-proofing the Pocketbook devices, bringing them up to the "current version" of the internet by supporting IPv6? Given that the Pocketbook devices are running a full Linux and not some other random OS, I can't imagine it'd be too hard to add. It's probably just a kernel flag somewhere, and a couple of GUI changes.