Files
ferrix/README.md
T
Rayhaan JaufeerallyandClaude Fable 5.1 9367c38907 Remove policy scripts
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>
2026-10-02 22:47:57 +02:00

2.9 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. It does not yet pass routes learned from one peer on to another.

It has not yet run in a production network.

Not there yet

  • Announcing learned routes to other peers, and an export policy for it
  • 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.