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ferrix/README.md
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Rayhaan JaufeerallyandClaude Fable 5.1 1e2e8f2d86 Pass learned routes on to peers, with marks and control communities
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>
2026-10-02 23:48:08 +02:00

3.0 KiB

Ferrix BGP

An implementation of the Border Gateway Protocol, which is used to exchange routing and control plane information between Autonomous Systems.

The aim of this project is to provide a modern, high performance, secure, programmatic and customizable software package that can be useful to network operators, researchers, and people interested in Internet.

Current status

The daemon holds sessions with configured peers, takes their routes through an import policy, validates them against the RPKI (route origin validation and ASPA), picks the best route for each prefix and, on Linux, installs it in the kernel. It announces the routes it originates and, to the peers configured for it, the best of what it learned from the others, as far as RFC 9234's roles and the routes' communities allow.

It has not yet run in a production network.

Not there yet

  • Route reflection, per-client selection for a route server, ADD-PATH for learned routes
  • TCP-AO / TCP MD5 and GTSM
  • Graceful restart, BFD, changing the configuration without a restart
  • Next hops that are not directly connected

Layout

Crate What is in it
crates/primitives Prefixes, address families, parsing helpers
crates/packet The wire format: messages, attributes, capabilities
crates/rib The routing table, best route selection, the journal of changes
crates/rpki The RTR client; origin validation and ASPA path verification
crates/fib The best routes in the Linux kernel, over netlink
crates/server Sessions, the state machine, policy, configuration
crates/web The status page, HTTP API and metrics
bin/bgp The daemon

Development

CI runs these on every push, and fails on any warning:

cargo fmt --all -- --check
cargo clippy --workspace --all-targets -- -D warnings
cargo test --workspace
RUSTDOCFLAGS="-D warnings" cargo doc --workspace --no-deps --document-private-items

It also runs the tests that need a real Linux kernel (scripts/kernel-tests.sh) and the lab with FRR, BIRD and Routinator (scripts/interop/lab.sh); scripts/linux-vm.sh runs either from macOS.

Lints are configured once, under [workspace.lints] in the root Cargo.toml. unsafe code is forbidden throughout.

cargo test includes property tests: generated messages must survive being written and read back, and no input, however damaged, may make a parser panic. They take about a second; for a longer hunt:

PROPTEST_CASES=1000000 cargo test --release -p bgp-packet --test properties

Coverage-guided fuzz targets for the same parsers are in fuzz/; see fuzz/README.md. CI runs each of them for a minute.

License

Apache License 2.0; see LICENSE.