Using a custom forwarding plane

[Ondrej Zajicek]

On Wed, Apr 08, 2015 at 01:33:43PM -0400, Jigar Mehta wrote:
> I am new to BIRD and routing engines in general. I needed to understand
> feasibility of using BIRD if the device has its own custom forwarding plane
> instead of letting Kernel do the forwarding.
> I have read through the coder's/user's documents but did not find answers
> to few questions :
> 
> 1. What is the best possible way of getting routes and route updates from
> Bird. I am looking for something like FPM interface provided by Quagga. I
> also wanted to store these routes in a mysql database for the purpose of my
> product.

There is no ready to use solution, but there are several possibilities:

1) Implement separate 'protocol' in BIRD and do forwarding plane
configuration there. It is simple, probably simpler than implementing FPM
client (just handle rt_notify() callback with FPM-equivalent semantics
and have some boilerplate code), but you have to comply with GPL
requirements of BIRD.

2) Implement FPM protocol (or something like that) to BIRD and use it, it
should be trivial.

3) Use regular kernel netlink interface with some non-default kernel
table, listen to netlink messages in your software and configure
forwarding plane based on that. This is probably the most difficult
alternative, but also the most universal one, would work with any
routing software (even 'ip route' tool).

> 2. How does Device protocol deal with TUN/TAP interfaces. Does it treat
> like a regular iface or do i need any special handling for them.

TUN/TAP interfaces are handled as any other interfaces, AFAIK.

-- 
Elen sila lumenn' omentielvo

Ondrej 'Santiago' Zajicek (email: santiago at crfreenet.org)
OpenPGP encrypted e-mails preferred (KeyID 0x11DEADC3, wwwkeys.pgp.net)
"To err is human -- to blame it on a computer is even more so."
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