Protocol lab

BGP Protocol Interop

Ze's BGP engine against real FRR, BIRD, and GoBGP, scenario by scenario.

Two ways to test Ze.

Use the Ze interop harness for protocol assertions, or netlab for reusable multi-node topologies.

Ze harness

Protocol interop scenarios

Run 68 curated scenarios against FRR, BIRD, and GoBGP. The harness starts only the required daemons and checks behavior through each peer's own CLI.

68 scenarios FRR BIRD GoBGP

Use the Ze harness scenario assertions

netlab

Reusable topology lab

Describe a three-node topology in YAML. netlab renders Ze configuration and starts each daemon node under containerlab.

YAML containerlab BGP OSPF IS-IS BFD

Use netlab three-node topology

Daemon

A Docker orchestrator launches Ze and one or more peer daemons on an isolated network, establishes real BGP sessions, and asserts correct behavior through each daemon's own CLI (vtysh, birdc, gobgp). Daemons start conditionally per scenario, so each run only spins up what it needs.

68 scenarios: eBGP/iBGP, 4-byte ASN, IPv6, Add-Path, Route Refresh, Graceful Restart, Route Server, standard and extended communities, MD5 auth, BGP Roles, EVPN, VPN, FlowSpec, multihop, BFD, ECMP, SRv6, RPKI, BMP, max-prefix, GTSM, AS112, and OSPF/IS-IS interop with FRR.

Proves Real BGP sessions against production daemon implementations, not mocks

Peers Real FRR, BIRD, and GoBGP, in Docker containers

Requires Docker, Python 3, ~1.5 GB disk for daemon images

Source docs/architecture/testing/interop.md

bgp-interop

# all 68 scenarios
$ make ze-interop-test

# single scenario, verbose
$ python3 test/interop/run.py 01-ebgp-ipv4-frr

Prerequisites

Docker only, no QEMU path. Set FRR_IMAGE to pin a different FRR version, or NO_BUILD=1 to skip rebuilding images on repeat runs.

test/interop/ lab source