A peer that restarts keeps its routes with us, and we keep ours with our peers while we restart, so that a restart withdraws nothing across the network and the machine goes on forwarding. On by default for every peer; `graceful_restart` sets the restart time we give, caps how long a peer's routes are kept, or turns it off. When a peer restarts: its routes are marked stale in the routing table, and chosen as before, for at most its restart time. When it is back, what it sends again is fresh, and the stale routes of a family go at its End-of-RIB marker, or after the cap; at once for a family whose forwarding it did not keep. Only a connection that failed counts as a restart, and, with RFC 8538 agreed, an expired hold timer or a NOTIFICATION other than a Hard Reset. The stale mark is a bit of the route's word that selection never looks at. When we restart: SIGUSR1 leaves the kernel's routes where they are, closes the sessions without a word where graceful restart is agreed, and exits with status 75, on which the systemd unit starts us again. The next start finds the routes in the kernel, says so in its OPENs (R, and F where forwarding was kept), and has them go once every peer has sent its End-of-RIB. Our own End-of-RIB markers for learned routes wait for that too. SIGTERM still stops for good, now with a Hard Reset where RFC 8538 is agreed, as are errors of ours. The status page and API show what was agreed with each peer, the routes kept while a peer restarts, and which routes are stale. Tested against FRR and BIRD in a new phase of the interoperability lab, and with routes kept in a real kernel over a restart. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
bgp
The daemon: the BGP speaker, the RTR client, the kernel route installer and the status page, in one binary.
cargo run -p bgp -- --check docs/examples/quick-start.textpb
cargo run -p bgp -- docs/examples/quick-start.textpb
How to configure, run and operate it is in the documentation, which is
built from docs/ (zola --root docs serve):