Week of 2025-12-15
The first tracked week of development on Ze. In seven days the BGP engine went from nothing to a config-driven daemon that speaks the wire protocol, holds a RIB, and tests itself against ExaBGP.
🏗️ Core BGP engine
The foundational pieces of a BGP speaker landed: wire-format encoding/decoding, all BGP message types, capability negotiation, path attributes, NLRI types, a RIB, the finite state machine, and the session/reactor layer that drives peer connections. A zero-copy byte-deduplication pool underpins the encoding path from the start.
🧩 Config and CLI
A schema-driven config parser landed with ExaBGP-compatible syntax (set-style blocks, arrays, serialization), wired straight through to the reactor. The CLI grew daemon and API run modes plus an interactive editor with autocomplete.
🔌 API and self-check testing
An API layer for external processes to talk to Ze, alongside a functional self-check test harness and a testpeer package that exercises the daemon against ExaBGP for compatibility, including passive-peer handling.
📜 RFC compliance pass
A broad pass brought the engine's attribute and NLRI handling in line with the relevant RFCs: EVPN Type 1, Type 4, and Type 5 (RFC 7432), BGP-LS, MVPN, VPLS, and FlowSpec VPN (SAFI 134) route support, extended next-hop encoding (RFC 5549/8950), AFI/SAFI family validation (RFC 4760), VPN next-hop RD parsing (RFC 4364/4659), MP-NLRI chunking (RFC 4271), AS_CONFED handling in AS4_PATH and ASN4-aware AS_PATH encoding (RFC 6793), and path attribute ordering (RFC 4271 Appendix F.3). Fixes went in for extended community parsing, FlowSpec numeric match operators, software-version capability parsing, and IPv6 route sending with correct end-of-RIB markers.
📦 Config migration and batched updates
Config syntax moved from neighbor to peer, with static routes migrating to announce, template-based group/match blocks, peer glob patterns (peer 192.168.*.*), and CLI commands to check and migrate older configs. Per-family negotiation now supports enable/disable/require modes plus a lenient ignore mode for UPDATE validation. On the sending side, routes are now grouped by shared attributes and packed into batched UPDATE messages per peer, with per-peer Adj-RIB-Out, transactional commits, and a CommitService that flushes and sends grouped UPDATEs as a unit.