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ferrix/docs/RFCs.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

12 KiB

RFCs

Tracks which RFCs are implemented, partially implemented, or only represented in the wire format layer.

Legend

  • ✅ Implemented — functional end-to-end
  • 🟡 Wire format only — parsed and serialised correctly, but not yet acted on
  • ❌ Not implemented

Core BGP

RFC 4271 — A Border Gateway Protocol 4 (BGP-4)

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4271

The base protocol specification.

Section Description Status
§4.1 Message framing (marker, length, type) ✅
§4.2 OPEN message ✅
§4.3 UPDATE message (path attributes, NLRI, withdrawn routes) ✅
§4.4 KEEPALIVE message ✅
§4.5 NOTIFICATION message (all error codes and subcodes) ✅
§8 FSM — passive (inbound) side: OpenSent → OpenConfirm → Established ✅
§8 FSM — active (outbound) side: dial configured peers, exponential retry ✅
§6.2 Bad Peer AS check against configured ASN ✅
§6.7 / RFC 4486 Cease / Administrative Shutdown sent to every peer on SIGINT or SIGTERM ✅
§6.8 Connection collision detection (BGP Identifier comparison, Cease / Connection Collision Resolution) ✅
§8.1.1 Optional CollisionDetectEstablishedState (collision_detect_established_state) ✅
§6.2 Bad BGP Identifier check (peer using our identifier, or 0.0.0.0) ✅
§9 Decision process / best-path selection ✅
§9.1.2 Best routes installed for forwarding (Linux kernel, over netlink), where the next hop is directly connected ✅
§9.1.2.1 Routes with an unresolvable next hop excluded from selection ✅ where routes are installed in the kernel: such a route is held out of the table until its next hop can be reached
§9.1.2.1 Next hops resolved through other routes ❌ (only next hops that are neighbors count as reachable)
§9 Adj-RIB-In (per-peer table of received routes) ✅
§9 Locally originated routes, advertised to all established peers ✅
§9 Loc-RIB / Adj-RIB-Out: the best route of each prefix passed on to peers (export.learned_routes), with our AS on the path and ourselves as next hop; MED and LOCAL_PREF not sent to other networks; LOCAL_PREF to our own (§5.1.4, §5.1.5, §9.1.3) ✅
§9.2.1 No route learned from one internal peer passed to another (no route reflection) ✅
§9.1.3 A route not sent to a peer whose AS is on its path ✅
§5 Unknown optional transitive attributes passed on with the Partial bit set; non-transitive ones dropped ✅
§9.2 Hold timer reset on any received message (not only KEEPALIVE) ✅

Capability and Session Extensions

RFC 6793 — BGP Support for Four-Octet Autonomous System (AS) Number Space

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6793

Feature Status
AS_TRANS (23456) sentinel ✅
FourByteAsn capability advertisement and parsing ✅
4-byte AS_PATH segment encoding/decoding via ParserContext ✅
4-byte ASN negotiation in FSM ✅
AS4_PATH from a two-octet peer merged into AS_PATH on receipt (§4.2.3); one longer than AS_PATH ignored ✅

RFC 9774 — Deprecation of AS_SET and AS_CONFED_SET in BGP

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9774

Feature Status
Routes with an AS_SET in their path refused on import (accept_as_sets takes them) ✅
AS_SET never sent ✅

RFC 9072 — Extended Optional Parameters Length for BGP OPEN Message

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9072

Feature Status
Parsing extended-length OPEN (0xFF sentinel) ✅
Serialising extended-length OPEN when options exceed 255 bytes ✅

RFC 2918 — Route Refresh Capability for BGP-4

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2918

Feature Status
RouteRefresh capability advertisement ✅
ROUTE-REFRESH message type (5) framing ✅
AFI/SAFI payload parsing ✅
Acting on received ROUTE-REFRESH (re-advertising all local routes, regardless of the AFI/SAFI asked for) ✅

RFC 7313 — Enhanced Route Refresh Capability for BGP-4

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7313

Feature Status
EnhancedRouteRefresh capability wire format 🟡

RFC 4724 — Graceful Restart Mechanism for BGP

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4724

Feature Status
GracefulRestart capability wire format 🟡
Restart state and forwarding preserved across sessions ❌

RFC 9494 — Long-Lived Graceful Restart for BGP

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9494

Feature Status
LongLivedGracefulRestart capability wire format 🟡

RFC 8654 — Extended Message Support for BGP

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8654

Feature Status
ExtendedMessage capability wire format 🟡
Raising BGP_MAX_MSG_LEN to 65535 when negotiated ❌

Multiprotocol and NLRI

RFC 2858 — Multiprotocol Extensions for BGP-4

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2858

Feature Status
MultiProtocol capability advertisement (IPv4 and IPv6 unicast) ✅
MP_REACH_NLRI path attribute (parse, serialise) ✅
MP_UNREACH_NLRI path attribute (parse, serialise) ✅
IPv4 and IPv6 next-hop encoding ✅

RFC 8950 — Advertising IPv4 Network Layer Reachability Information (NLRI) with an IPv6 Next Hop

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8950

Feature Status
ExtendedNextHop capability offered on sessions over IPv6 that carry IPv4 unicast, and used if the peer offers it ✅
IPv4 unicast routes sent and withdrawn in MP_REACH_NLRI / MP_UNREACH_NLRI with our IPv6 address as next hop ✅
IPv4 unicast routes received with an IPv6 next hop (global, or global and link-local) ✅
Such routes installed in the kernel (IPv4 route by way of an IPv6 neighbor) ✅
Other families than IPv4 unicast (VPN-IPv4, labelled) ❌
Sessions between link-local addresses (fe80::1%eth0), with link-local next hops ✅

Path Attributes and Communities

RFC 1997 — BGP Communities Attribute

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1997

Feature Status
COMMUNITIES path attribute (parse, serialise) ✅
Attach to locally originated routes ✅
NO_EXPORT, NO_EXPORT_SUBCONFED and NO_ADVERTISE honoured when learned routes are passed on ✅
Communities put on and taken off routes by configuration (import and export) ✅

RFC 4360 — BGP Extended Communities Attribute

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4360

Feature Status
EXTENDED_COMMUNITIES path attribute (parse, serialise) ✅
AS-specific, IPv4-address-specific, opaque, route-target, route-origin subtypes ✅

RFC 8092 — BGP Large Communities Attribute

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8092

Feature Status
LARGE_COMMUNITIES path attribute (parse, serialise) ✅
Attach to locally originated routes ✅

Other Capabilities (Wire Format Only)

The following capabilities are parsed and serialised correctly but have no functional behaviour implemented beyond that.

RFC Capability Status
RFC 5291 Outbound Route Filtering (ORF) 🟡
RFC 8205 BGPsec 🟡

Error Handling

RFC 9687 — BGP Send Hold Timer

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9687

Feature Status
SendHoldTimer error code (8) defined ✅
Send hold timer enforcement (a write that makes no progress ends the session) ✅

Route Security

RFC 6811 — BGP Prefix Origin Validation

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6811

Feature Status
Validation states (valid, invalid, not found) for routes from external peers ✅
Invalid routes refused, per peer (accept_rpki_invalid to take them) ✅
Routes revalidated when the VRPs change, in both directions ✅
Validation of routes from internal peers and of originated routes ❌
Validity as a step of route selection (RFC 8097 communities) ❌

draft-ietf-sidrops-aspa-verification — BGP AS_PATH Verification Based on ASPA

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-sidrops-aspa-verification/

Implemented from version 24 of the draft.

Feature Status
Upstream verification (routes from customers, peers, route servers and route server clients) ✅
Downstream verification (routes from providers) ✅
Per-peer role (role); paths of peers without one are not verified ✅
Invalid paths refused, per peer (accept_aspa_invalid to take them) ✅
Routes revalidated when the ASPAs change, in both directions ✅
Paths with an AS_SET invalid ✅
Verification on export ❌ (learned routes are not exported yet)

RFC 7947 — Internet Exchange BGP Route Server

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7947

Feature Status
§2.2.1 / §2.2.2: to a ROUTE_SERVER_CLIENT the path is not prepended and the next hop and MED are left as they came ✅
§2.2.2.2 / §4.6: communities by which a client says which other clients are told of its route (control_communities) ✅
Per-client best path selection (a different best route for each client) ❌ (every client is told the one best route)

RFC 9234 — Route Leak Prevention and Detection Using Roles in UPDATE and OPEN Messages

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9234

Feature Status
BGP Role capability sent for peers with a configured role ✅
Role Mismatch (OPEN Message Error, subcode 11) when the peer's role does not pair with ours, or it sends differing roles ✅
Strict mode (require_role) ✅
Only to Customer attribute: parse, serialise, treat-as-withdraw when malformed ✅
Ingress: marked routes from customers, route server clients and (unless marked by the peer itself) peers refused ✅
Ingress: routes from providers, peers and route servers marked ✅
Egress: originated routes to customers, peers and route server clients marked ✅
Egress: marked routes not sent to providers, peers or route servers ✅

RFC 8210 — The RPKI to Router Protocol, Version 1 (RFC 6810, version 0; draft-ietf-sidrops-8210bis, version 2)

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8210

Version 2 is implemented from version 23 of the draft.

Feature Status
Reset and serial queries, notifies, cache reset, incremental updates ✅
Refresh, retry and expire intervals; data dropped when it expires ✅
Version 2, with fallback to 1 and 0; several caches with failover ✅
ASPA PDU (version 2) ✅
Error Reports sent to the cache ✅
Version 2's ordering of PDUs enforced on what a cache sends ❌ (any order is taken)
Transport over plain TCP ✅
Transport over SSH, TLS, TCP-MD5 or TCP-AO ❌
Router keys (BGPsec) 🟡 read and ignored

RFC 7911 — Advertisement of Multiple Paths in BGP (ADD-PATH)

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7911

Feature Status
Capability negotiation per family and direction ✅
Receiving several routes for a prefix ✅
Sending several routes for a prefix ❌ (path identifiers are sent; one route each)

RFC 4271 §9.1.2 / RFC 4486 / operational practice — import policy

Feature Status
Own AS in path refused (loop detection) ✅
Bogon prefixes and AS numbers, prefix length bounds, first-AS check ✅
Per-peer prefix and origin AS allow-lists ✅
Maximum prefixes with Cease / Maximum Number of Prefixes Reached and hold-down ✅