GRE encapsulation adds a fixed 24 bytes of overhead to every packet it carries — 4 bytes for the GRE header itself and 20 bytes for the new outer IPv4 delivery header. When a host transmits a full 1500-byte Ethernet payload into a gr- interface, the resulting encapsulated packet becomes 1524 bytes, which exceeds the physical interface's standard 1500-byte MTU and forces fragmentation or drops if the don't-fragment bit is set. The correct remediation is to reduce the effective MTU seen by end hosts so that encapsulated packets never exceed the physical link's transmission limit. Junos automatically applies this logic to gr- logical interfaces, which default to a 1476-byte protocol MTU (1500 minus 24), but when the underlying physical interface or a manually configured path is involved, administrators must explicitly size the interface MTU to 1476 bytes to prevent post-encapsulation oversize packets. Allowing fragmentation with clear-dont-fragment is a workaround that increases CPU load and can degrade performance rather than solving the root cause, BFD addresses link-failure detection rather than MTU sizing, and ToS copying affects only the type-of-service byte, not packet length. Reference topics: Junos Enterprise Routing – Tunneling, GRE Encapsulation and MTU Considerations; Junos OS Configuring GRE Tunnel Interfaces.