Weekly update

Week of 2026-01-12

A week focused on Graceful Restart, ExaBGP migration tooling, and logging.

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🛰️ Graceful Restart

A dedicated Graceful Restart plugin now handles per-peer restart-time configuration and registers the GR capability with peers during session startup, building on the plugin system's new per-peer capability support.

🔀 ExaBGP migration

For anyone running ExaBGP today, Ze picked up a migration path:

  • zebgp exabgp migrate converts ExaBGP configs to Ze's format (neighbor -> peer syntax, capability normalization, automatic wiring of the RIB plugin when graceful-restart or route-refresh is in use)
  • zebgp exabgp plugin runs existing ExaBGP process plugins under Ze via a bridge that translates JSON and commands both ways
  • The bridge forwards negotiated capabilities and next-hop information to those plugins, including RFC 8950 extended next-hop handling

📊 Logging

Per-subsystem logging landed, with SLOG_LEVEL to control verbosity and debug logging available where needed.

🧩 Config & API

  • The text-based update API now covers end-of-RIB markers, VPLS, and EVPN routes
  • EVPN Type 5 routes support the RFC 9136 gateway keyword for overlay index resolution
  • Plugin startup timeouts are now configurable per plugin
  • Config validation now catches route-refresh or graceful-restart enabled without a process to resend routes, instead of failing silently later