What was to be scripted is configuration, done natively:
- import { add_communities, add_large_communities, remove_communities,
local_pref }: every route taken from a peer is marked (where it was
learned, say), with nobody else's word for our marks taken, and given
its preference, which selection goes by.
- export { add_communities, add_large_communities, remove_communities,
as_path_prepend, learned_routes }, for a peer or for all that have none
of their own.
- control_communities: the communities by which routes say which peers
they are passed on to, as exchanges' route servers have them (0:P, L:P,
0:L, and the large forms L:0:P, L:1:P, L:0:0), taken off as the route
goes on.
And what the last of these is for: with export.learned_routes a peer is
told the best route of every prefix the others announced. The rules are
BGP's and cannot be turned off: not back where it came from, not to a
peer whose AS is on the path, not between two internal peers, not past
NO_EXPORT or NO_ADVERTISE; our AS on the path and ourselves as next hop
to another network, LOCAL_PREF to our own; to a route server's client
the path, MED and next hop as they came (RFC 7947). Which routes go where
follows from the roles of RFC 9234: a route that came down or across goes
on down only, so that with roles on every peer this makes us transit for
our customers and nothing else. A peer without a role is told everything,
and the daemon says so at startup.
Each session follows the table's best routes with a reader and keeps the
prefixes it has announced, so that it can withdraw them. Routes that go
out alike go in one UPDATE: changes are gathered for 50 ms first, and a
table that is given out anew is gathered whole (at most four sessions at
a time; it is tens of megabytes). For that to work the table's journal
had to give out together what was written together: every change now
carries a time on a table-wide clock, a reader's pass reads every shard
up to one time, no further than the changes that are complete in every
shard, and a resync takes its places in the journals as of one time.
One peer sending 1.23 M routes over a session, another told of them:
in our table after 0.47 s, all heard after 2.1 s, four routes an UPDATE.
The lab has a phase, transit: FRR as our customer and BIRD as our
provider, routes each way with the right paths and marks, one kept back
by a community, and pings between their networks through us.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Rhai made a decision about a route cost one to three microseconds,
some two hundred times what the same costs in Rust. That was bearable
where a function is asked once for an UPDATE, and is not where every
route is weighed against every peer, as it is when routes are passed
on. What is wanted of a policy (mark routes by where they came from,
mark what is announced, let communities say who is told what) needs no
language; it is to be configuration, done natively.
Kept from that work: route selection goes by a LOCAL_PREF that policy
set on a route from an external peer, and the lab's configuration can
be added to by a phase.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A new crate, bgp-policy, runs functions of a script on routes: on their
way in, after the general checks of a peer's import and before the
checks that can change (RPKI, next hop reachability); and on their way
out to a peer. A function is given the route and the peer, may refuse
the route, and may change its communities, large communities,
LOCAL_PREF and MED, and on the way out prepend our AS:
fn from_peer(route, peer) {
if route.has_community("65535:666") { return false; }
route.add_community(LEARNED_FROM[peer.role]);
route.local_pref = PREFERENCE[peer.role];
true
}
Configuration: policy { path | source, import_function, export_function }
and, for a peer, import { function } and export { function }. The script
is compiled at startup; `bgp --check` reads it and says which function
is whose. A function that fails on a route has refused it. Scripts have
no files, network or clock, and are stopped after 200,000 steps.
Route selection now goes by a LOCAL_PREF on a route from an external
peer: the decoder never lets a peer's own through, so one that is there
was set by policy.
What it costs was measured before it was built on (benches/policy.rs):
a call that tests a few communities and changes two takes 1 to 3
microseconds, some two hundred times what Rust would. So a function is
asked once for the routes of an UPDATE, which share their attributes,
unless it asks for the prefix. One peer sending 1.23 M routes over a
session: 0.37 s without a function, 0.80 s with one that marks and
ranks every route, 3.4 s if it also looks at the prefix.
Export applies to what is announced, which today is what the daemon
originates; learned routes are not passed on yet.
Tested by unit tests of the crate, sessions end to end, a fuzz target on
the example script (testdata/policy.rhai), and a lab phase in which a
script changes which of FRR's and BIRD's route is chosen and what each
of them is told.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A peer's endpoint may be a link-local IPv6 address with the interface it
is on. Such a peer is the address and the interface together, wherever
peers are told apart: admission, collisions, hold-downs, the refusal log,
the status page. The interface is looked up by name each time it is
needed, so one that appears later or is made anew is found.
Our routes go out with our link-local address in both places of
MP_REACH_NLRI's next hop, as FRR sends its own. A peer's link-local next
hop is taken alone, twice, or after "::" (BIRD), and resolved in the
kernel on the interface of the session rather than by looking fe80::/64
up, which every interface has.
The lab has a new phase, linklocal: sessions with FRR (by interface, with
radvd beside the daemon) and BIRD over a LAN with link-local addresses
only, both families, pings across, the interface down and up.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A peer's configured role now does three more things:
- Our OPEN carries the BGP Role capability with what we are to the peer.
A peer whose own says it is something that does not pair with that, or
that sends two different roles, is refused with OPEN Message Error /
Role Mismatch. A peer that says nothing is accepted unless require_role
is set. A role on a peer in our own AS is a configuration error.
- Routes from a provider, a peer or a route server are marked Only to
Customer on the way in if they are not already, and our routes are
marked on the way out to a customer, a peer or a route server client.
- A marked route from a customer or route server client, or from a peer
with someone else's mark, is a leak and is refused. No policy setting
turns that off.
The packet crate gains the Only to Customer attribute (malformed:
treat-as-withdraw), and the Role Mismatch subcode is corrected from 8 to
11.
The status page shows whether the peer confirmed its role.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Origin validation says who may originate a prefix and nothing about the
rest of the path: it does not catch a route leak, nor a hijack that keeps
the right origin at the end of a made-up path. ASPAs, in which a network
lists its providers, do.
bgp-rpki:
- aspa: the ASPAs and the upstream and downstream verification procedures
of draft-ietf-sidrops-aspa-verification-24, tested against the draft's
wording as written.
- rtr: protocol version 2 (draft-ietf-sidrops-8210bis-23) with the ASPA
PDU and the new error codes.
- client: asks for version 2 and falls back to whatever older version the
cache speaks; keeps ASPAs with the VRPs, applied whole or not at all;
publishes which customers' ASPAs changed; tells the cache why it is
being left (Error Report); does not ask one version's serial of another.
Server:
- A peer has a role (provider, customer, peer, route server, route server
client), which decides how its paths are verified. Without one they are
not.
- A route whose path is invalid is refused ("ASPA invalid") and held, like
one with an invalid origin; accept_aspa_invalid exempts a peer.
- When ASPAs change, routes in the table whose path has a changed customer
on it are verified again, and held routes are released when they pass
both checks.
- The revalidator finds a route's peer by index instead of searching a
list for every route.
The status page and API show each peer's role, each route's path validity,
the number of ASPAs and the RTR version in use; bgp_rpki_aspas is on
/metricz.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A configured peer could announce any prefix with any path, in any
number, and all of it was stored and could be chosen as best. Each
peer now has an import policy, and every route goes through it before
it reaches the routing table.
Checks that hold for any peer unless turned off for it:
- no prefixes that are not routed on the Internet (private, loopback,
link-local, documentation, multicast, reserved; for IPv6, anything
outside global unicast);
- nothing longer than /24 or /48, no default route, nothing shorter
than /8 or /16;
- no reserved, private or documentation AS number in the path;
- a path that begins with the peer's own AS (turned off for a route
server), and of at most 64 AS numbers.
Always: a route with our own AS number in its path is refused. RFC 4271
requires this loop check and it was missing.
Per peer, if configured: the prefixes it may announce, each with an
optional longest more-specific, and the AS numbers its routes may
originate from. This is the list generated from the routing registries.
max_prefixes limits how many routes a peer may have. One more ends the
session with Cease / Maximum Number of Prefixes Reached, and the peer
is kept down for hold_down_seconds (ten minutes unless set): its
connections are not taken and it is not dialled. Refused routes do not
count towards the limit.
A refused route is withdrawn rather than ignored, so that it replaces
whatever the peer had announced for it before.
On a session with two-octet AS numbers the path is judged with its
AS4_PATH merged in, so that the real AS numbers are what is checked.
Peers that are not configured (accept_unconfigured_peers, for test
networks) get a policy that takes everything but loops.
Refusals are counted in bgp_routes_rejected_total by reason. The status
page and /api/peers show, for each session, how many routes the peer
has and how many were refused. The server warns at startup about peers
with no limit.
The prefix check costs about 4 ns a route with the default policy; the
end-to-end benchmark is unchanged.
Also: the benchmark's server AS is one that is in none of its generated
paths, and a table test that depended on the hasher's seed is fixed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The work of the speaker-cleanup branch as one commit; the branch keeps
the step-by-step history.
Sessions
- The state machine is a pure function from events to actions, driven by
one task per connection. Idle, Connect and Active belong to a dialer
that keeps configured peers up with backoff.
- Capabilities are negotiated: address families, four-octet AS numbers
with AS_TRANS and AS4_PATH, route refresh, ADD-PATH per family and
direction.
- Collision detection per RFC 4271 section 6.8, by address and
identifier.
- Connections are taken only from configured peers, a few per address.
- A panic in a session is contained and answered with a Cease; a core
task that stops shuts the server down with a Cease to every peer.
- Writes that make no progress are given up (RFC 9687).
Codec
- Malformed UPDATEs are handled as RFC 7606 says: treat-as-withdraw,
attribute discard, or session reset, with the NOTIFICATION to send.
- Address families are open types; any can be named and ignored.
- Prefixes are fixed-size values, normalised, with path identifiers.
- Lengths are filled in after writing; one definition of each type code.
- Property tests and fuzz targets for every decoder.
Routing table
- Adj-RIBs-In and Loc-RIB in one sharded table that sessions write to
directly. Routes are sixteen bytes; attribute sets are interned in
wire form. Best-path selection per RFC 4271 section 9.1.2.2 with
deterministic MED.
- A journal per shard lets followers read changes at their own pace;
one that falls behind is resynchronised.
- On a RIPE RIS dump of 148 peers and 39.3M routes: loaded in 2.0 s on
12 cores, about 52 bytes a route.
Announcing
- Originated routes come from the configuration. Each session has its
own exporter with an Adj-RIB-Out, so a slow peer delays only itself.
- Routes to a peer in our own AS have an empty path and a LOCAL_PREF.
Operations
- HTTP status page, JSON API, event stream and Prometheus metrics.
- Benchmarks on synthetic and real tables.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
