Weekly update

Week of 2026-01-26

Config work, the ExaBGP migration path, and correctness fixes across the wire.

← All weekly updates

🧩 Family plugins

BGP-LS, VPN, EVPN and FlowSpec are now standalone family plugins with their own CLI decode/encode mode, human-readable output by default, and JSON or text input. A two-phase startup (explicit plugins first, then auto-load by family) avoids conflicts when more than one plugin could claim the same NLRI type. Capability decoding is plugin-driven too: unknown capabilities now show as code=N with raw hex instead of being opaque, and a new hostname (FQDN) capability plugin injects per-peer hostname/domain into the OPEN message.

🔄 ExaBGP migration

The ExaBGP config migration tool now converts announce/static blocks to Ze's native update {} syntax across all 38 test configs (up from 2). Legacy ExaBGP config syntax (announce/static/flow/l2vpn) has been removed from Ze entirely; route announcements now go exclusively through native update { attribute {} nlri {} } blocks, which also gained watchdog support for route withdrawal control.

🐛 Correctness fixes

  • AS_PATH prepending is now RFC 4271 compliant: Ze no longer double-prepends the local AS when the configured path already starts with it
  • Connection collision resolution (RFC 4271 §6.8) no longer risks a panic under load; it uses proper channel synchronization for session teardown instead of a timed sleep
  • An explicit hold-time 0 (disable keepalives, RFC 4271) is preserved instead of being silently reset to the 90s default
  • Route Distinguisher is now parsed inline with the NLRI (as RFC 8955/4364 define it) instead of as a path attribute, consistent across API, config, and VPN families
  • FlowSpec's OR-of-AND filter encoding now round-trips correctly

🧰 Config editor and CLI

The editor gained mandatory peer-as validation with template inheritance, a prompt to resume pending edits left from a previous session, and a new ze config edit command. config check, dump, migrate, validate and schema all accept input on stdin now, useful for scripting.

🛠️ Under the hood

RIB storage moved to per-attribute deduplication, cutting memory use for peers carrying large overlapping route sets.