Week of 2026-05-25
MPLS grew a full label-switching stack, flow export and gNMI landed, and config commits became transactional.
🛰️ MPLS
Label switching across three layers, verified live in QEMU against FRR:
- Kernel MPLS dataplane: push, swap, and pop programmed via netlink, with relabel support that updates a route ze already owns without clobbering another writer's
- LDP (RFC 5036): per-interface Hello discovery, a TCP session FSM, a label information base, and downstream-unsolicited distribution
- RSVP-TE with FRR interop
- Per-interface MPLS input and MPLS sysctl keys on interfaces
📊 Observability & telemetry
- Flow export: sFlow v5, NetFlow v9 (RFC 3954), and IPFIX (RFC 7011), with per-flow records and interface counter export to external collectors
- A new gNMI component (Capabilities, Get, Set, Subscribe over gRPC) for YANG-modeled config management
show bgp peeroutput enriched to NOS-grade detail, and all IANA well-known BGP community names are now recognisedze supportgenerates a tech-support bundle, and SMART disk health reporting moved to a pure-Go ioctl reader (no more shelling out to smartctl)ze doctorpicked up more readiness checks: BGP MD5 support detection, VPP socket path validation, NTP/RPKI/BMP checks, and a semantic validation bridge
🖥️ CLI
All plugin-owned commands were renamed to a consistent verb-first grammar. Command arguments are now declared as typed YANG leaves, driving completion, validation, and docs from one source. Other additions: ze help command for a self-documenting command catalog, | first N and | last N pipe operators, session transcript recording (so a crash or dropped SSH session still leaves a local record), a configurable default output format, and ANSI color support in the terminal buffer library.
🔒 Config & commit reliability
Config commits are now transactional: changes go through candidate/active/rollback versions and are only promoted after a runtime reload actually succeeds, with automatic cleanup of failed candidates. A new operation-graph solver orders config changes correctly across components (so, for example, an address and the peer that depends on it apply in the right sequence). Config schemas now carry a release-based stamp with an evolution framework for future migrations, and YANG type empty leaves can be used as simple presence flags. Separately, a real auth bug was fixed: PXE and bootstrap-provisioned appliances were never loading the zefs "power user," which silently broke SSH login and the web/API per-user auth path on freshly provisioned boxes.
🛰️ BGP policy & RIB efficiency
New policy actions: an AS-PATH-length filter, increment/decrement on numeric attributes (local-preference, MED, AIGP), community add/remove, and an RFC 6996 remove-private-as filter. Policy chains can now use plain, operator-facing filter names instead of <plugin>:<filter> refs, and show policy test runs a chain against a supplied UPDATE without touching live state. On the RIB side, peer reconnect replay and bgp rib clear out now use cursor-based grouped resend instead of per-route sends, cutting reconnect replay time on large tables from seconds to roughly 100-200ms.
💿 Appliance & provisioning
PXE boot option support (RFC 4578) rounds out last week's DHCP/TFTP/image-server work. A busybox-based initrd now handles bare-metal PXE installs end to end (fetch, verify, write, reboot), and a first-boot bootstrap mode brings up DHCP and SSH automatically when a box has zefs but no config yet. Elsewhere: OTA image push via a vendored gokrazy updater, a unified update backend with platform-aware dispatch, and ze service for installing Ze as a systemd service on standard (non-gokrazy) Linux hosts.