The 1.6 (Glacier Peak) Magma release includes lots of great performance and reliability improvements, adds support for some new features, enhances existing ones and adds fixes for other known issues. This release officially deprecates support for Debian and establishes Ubuntu as the only supported OS for deploying Magma. See the release page and test report for more functionality and scale information.

Key Features

Inbound roaming enhancements

Inbound roaming was first launched in v1.5 to provide network mobility support by allowing mobile users from one operator network to access services while visiting areas outside their network coverage. Paging support as well as other relevant fixes have now been added to enhance the feature. See the related issues for details about other related work.

Service Area (TAC) Restriction

In addition to PLMN and IMEI network restriction features, Magma now supports Service Area (TAC) Restriction in beta for federated deployments. In a given PLMN, this feature allows network operators to create different service areas for which a UE is allowed or not allowed to attach to the network by configuring subscriber data on HSS with the allowed zone codes and by assigning a list of tracking area codes to each zone code using Orc8r APIs or the NMS for EPC configuration. See the related issues for details about other related work.

Congestion Control for UE attach/detach

MME introduced congestion control that rejects attach requests with cause congestion or implicitly drops initial UE messages based on the latencies observed in message processing in S1AP and NAS layers. This feature is added to maintain the stability of MME when the message processing speed falls behind the incoming request rate from RAN side. The feature can be disabled per AGW instance or at the network level using Orc8r or NMS. The congestion thresholds can be changes by modifying the associated configurations in the mme.yml file

Router mode dataplane

In Non-NAT mode, AGW is pre-configured in router mode where the AGW acts as the L3 next hop for the UE allocated subnet. Refer to the Magma AGW Non-NAT mode section of the online documentation for details.

GTP-U Segmentation offload

AGW can make use of the UDP Tunnel Segmentation Offload feature available in modern NICs for GTP-U tunnel traffic. This improves dataplane throughput.

Orc8r

Core

New bulk upload API has been added to provide an endpoint for the bulk provisioning of subscribers
Added support for subscriber digests for more efficient subscriber syncs to the access gateway
Added new metrics around certificate expiry and corresponding alerts on the NMS

Deployment

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS, part of AWS) DB backups are now configured to be taken automatically to facilitate data recovery in cases of severe outages
Backup retentions for RDS are now configurable (AWS environments)
Configurable but optional notifications via email on various RDS events are now supported (AWS environments)
Orc8r deployment and cleanup from Community or Custom builds have now been greatly simplified
Elasticsearch curator changes to purge magma log indices based on space thresholds
Upgraded prometheus version from v2.20.1 to v2.27.1
Terraform version 0.15.0 is now supported

NMS

The Alerts UI has been updated to enhance the user experience
New Gateway YML editor has been added to enable a more convenient path to modify gateway service configurations, all within NMS

Access Gateway in the Cloud

Pre-built AGW AMIs from AWS Marketplace are now available for in-region, edge and on-premises AWS compute device deployments. Get started on AWS marketplace

Lawful Intercept (LI)

This feature aims at providing a standard Lawful Interception solution in beta as specified in ETSI TS 103 221-1 for X1 and ETSI TS 103 221-2 for X2 and X3

Known Issues

GTP-U Echo Request/Response for Inbound Roaming are not currently supported (GTP-U Echo Requests are supposed to be responded to by the AGW). If remote PGWs are configured with an inactivity timer, devices idle for longer than the S8 inactivity timer may not have a corresponding S8 bearer upon transitioning to the active state. This feature will be supported in subsequent releases. NOTE: Echo Requests/Responses are supported on GTP-C since v1.4
Subscriber database might not sync with the fresh install. Verify if there are any sync issues journalctl -fu magma@subscriberdb and restart Magma services by issuing following commands:
- service magma@* stop
- service magma@magmad restart
Control_proxy service errors if using both /var/opt/ and /etc/magma. control_proxy[6877]: 2021-07-06T23:16:24.590Z [127.0.0.1 -> streamer-controller.magma.etagecom.io,8443] "POST /magma.orc8r.Streamer/GetUpdates HTTP/2" 502 158bytes 0.051s
- Restart the Magma services to override contents with /var/opt location
  - service magma@* stop
  - service magma@magmad restart

Fresh Install Notes

Note: Debian is no longer supported for new installations of v1.6 and beyond For new gateway installations on Ubuntu 20.04 Server, please use the following install scripts.

Ubuntu

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/magma/magma/master/lte/gateway/deploy/agw_install_ubuntu.sh
chmod +x agw_install_ubuntu.sh
./agw_install_ubuntu.sh

Upgrade Notes

Cloud Upgrade

Cloud upgrade is supported from v1.5.2
Please note that the orc8r main.tf file should reference orc8r helm chart version - 1.5.23
New alerts (e.g. Cert expiry) have been added in this release. Similar to prior releases, it is necessary to click on the “Sync Pre-Defined alerts” in the NMS window for every network defined in the orc8r. Syncing the alerts once on the NMS does not replicate the behavior to other networks managed by the same NMS.

Access Gateway

Repo Change - Beginning with Magma Fuji (v1.5), Magma artifacts are now hosted on the new Magma Core repositories. Gateways migrating from older Magma releases should run the migration script to update the sources accordingly. This repository currently supports both Debian and Ubuntu OS flavors. Please note that v1.5.x aka Fuji is the last release with Debian support.

Note: Note: Debian is no longer supported for upgrades to v1.6 and beyond To upgrade an existing AGW, please run the following upgrade script. bash wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/magma/magma/master/lte/gateway/release/upgrade_magma.sh chmod +x upgrade_magma.sh ./upgrade_magma_sh

Image Version

Ubuntu > 1.6.0-1625592603-1f26ba81

Critical bug fixes

Fixed the certifier service to register the prometheus gauge (#7893)
Fixed ITTI message construction with correct APN size (#7901)
Removed Fatal from emergency attach handling (#7903)
Added ability to add Service Identifier mapping together to Rating Group. This is in order to include AVP code 439 Service-Identifier inside AVP MSCC in CCR-I send to OCS (#7498)
TCP diameter Gx/Gy links failure (#7496)
Fixed match for uplink egress flows in pipelineD (#7752)
Changed is_standalone to address multiple concurrent sessions (#7794)
Bug fix for Service Area Restriction during TAU procedure (#7799)
SubscriberDB service misc fixes related to APN resource handling (#7846)

Other fixes

Moved stats collection for eNodeB into S1AP thread (#7758)
Updated AGW to support the flat digest pattern, including storing and communicating digests (#7340)
Replaced “with default” getter with new MustGetEnv function in set SQL driver and DB source in orc8r/cloud/go/storage/storage.go (#7484)
Migrated stats collection to the mme_app thread (#7710)
Added 4GB of swap be default to magma VM (#7790)
Add minor Orc8r deployment changes. (#7717 and #7849)