Rayhaan JaufeerallyandClaude Opus 5.5
65f136048e
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>
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 establishes BGP sessions with configured neighbors, evaluates received routes against import policy, validates them with the RPKI (route origin validation and ASPA), selects the best path for each prefix, and, on Linux, installs it in the kernel. It advertises the routes that it originates and, to neighbors configured for it, the best paths learned from other neighbors, as BGP roles (RFC 9234) and communities permit.
Ferrix has not been deployed in a production network.
Unsupported Features
- Route reflection, per-client best path selection for route servers, and ADD-PATH for advertised routes
- TCP-AO, TCP MD5, and GTSM
- Graceful restart, BFD, and configuration changes without a restart
- Recursive resolution of 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 |
Documentation
The documentation is a website built from docs/ with
Zola:
zola --root docs serve # http://127.0.0.1:1111
- Overview and quick start
- User guide: BGP neighbors, import policy, BGP roles, RPKI, kernel route installation, route advertisement, configuration examples
- Deployment and monitoring
- Reference: configuration, HTTP API, metrics, supported standards
- Architecture and testing
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
zola --root docs build
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.