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1. BIRD Design

1.1 Introduction

This document describes the internal workings of BIRD, its architecture, design decisions and rationale behind them. It also contains documentation on all the essential components of the system and their interfaces.

Routing daemons are complicated things which need to act in real time to complex sequences of external events, respond correctly even to the most erroneous behavior of their environment and still handle enormous amount of data with reasonable speed. Due to all of this, their design is very tricky as one needs to carefully balance between efficiency, stability and (last, but not least) simplicity of the program and it would be possible to write literally hundreds of pages about all of these issues. In accordance to the famous quote of Anton Chekhov "Shortness is a sister of talent", we've tried to write a much shorter document highlighting the most important stuff and leaving the boring technical details better explained by the program source itself together with comments contained therein.

1.2 Design goals

When planning the architecture of BIRD, we've taken a close look at the other existing routing daemons and also at some of the operating systems used on dedicated routers, gathered all important features and added lots of new ones to overcome their shortcomings and to better match the requirements of routing in today's Internet: IPv6, policy routing, route filtering and so on. From this planning, the following set of design goals has arisen:

1.3 Architecture

The requirements set above have lead to a simple modular architecture containing the following types of modules:

Core modules

implement the core functions of BIRD: taking care of routing tables, keeping protocol status, interacting with the user using the Command-Line Interface (to be called CLI in the rest of this document) etc.

Library modules

form a large set of various library functions implementing several data abstractions, utility functions and also functions which are a part of the standard libraries on some systems, but missing on other ones.

Resource management modules

take care of resources, their allocation and automatic freeing when the module having requested shuts itself down.

Configuration modules

are fragments of lexical analyzer, grammar rules and the corresponding snippets of C code. For each group of code modules (core, each protocol, filters) there exist a configuration module taking care of all the related configuration stuff.

The filter

implements the route filtering language.

Protocol modules

implement the individual routing protocols.

System-dependent modules

implement the interface between BIRD and specific operating systems.

The client

is a simple program providing an easy, though friendly interface to the CLI.

1.4 Implementation

BIRD has been written in GNU C. We've considered using C++, but we've preferred the simplicity and straightforward nature of C which gives us fine control over all implementation details and on the other hand enough instruments to build the abstractions we need.

The modules are statically linked to produce a single executable file (except for the client which stands on its own).

The building process is controlled by a set of Makefiles for GNU Make, intermixed with several Perl and shell scripts.

The initial configuration of the daemon, detection of system features and selection of the right modules to include for the particular OS and the set of protocols the user has chosen is performed by a configure script generated by GNU Autoconf.

The parser of the configuration is generated by the GNU Bison.

The documentation is generated using SGMLtools with our own DTD and mapping rules which produce both an online version in HTML and a neatly formatted one for printing (first converted from SGML to LaTeX and then processed by TeX and dvips to get a PostScript file).

The comments from C sources which form a part of the programmer's documentation are extracted using a modified version of the kernel-doc tool.

If you want to work on BIRD, it's highly recommended to configure it with a --enable-debug switch which enables some internal consistency checks and it also links BIRD with a memory allocation checking library if you have one (either efence or dmalloc).


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