There is a simple universal IO loop, taking care of events, timers and
sockets. Primarily, one instance of a protocol should use exactly one IO
loop to do all its work, as is now done in BFD.
Contrary to previous versions, the loop is now launched and cleaned by
the nest/proto.c code, allowing for a protocol to just request its own
loop by setting the loop's lock order in config higher than the_bird.
It is not supported nor checked if any protocol changed the requested
lock order in reconfigure. No protocol should do it at all.
In previous versions, every thread used its own time structures,
effectively leading to different time in every thread and strange
logging messages.
The time processing code now uses global atomic variables to keep
current time available for fast concurrent reading and safe updates.
The new MRT protocol is responsible for periodic RIB table dumps in the
MRT format (RFC 6396). Also the existing code for BGP4MP MRT dumps is
refactored and splitted between BGP to MRT protocols, will be more
integrated into MRT in the future.
Example:
protocol mrt {
table "*";
filename "%N_%F_%T.mrt";
period 60;
}
It is partially based on the old MRT code from Pavel Tvrdik.
The old timer interface is still kept, but implemented by new timers. The
plan is to switch from the old inteface to the new interface, then clean
it up.