Once upon a time, far far away, there were the old Bird developers
discussing what direction of route flow shall be called import and
export. They decided to say "import to protocol" and "export to table"
when speaking about a protocol. When speaking about a table, they
spoke about "importing to table" and "exporting to protocol".
The latter terminology was adopted in configuration, then also the
bird CLI in commit ea2ae6dd0 started to use it (in year 2009). Now
it's 2018 and the terminology is the latter. Import is from protocol to
table, export is from table to protocol. Anyway, there was still an
import_control hook which executed right before route export.
One thing is funny. There are two commits in April 1999 with just two
minutes between them. The older announces the final settlement
on config terminology, the newer uses the other definition. Let's see
their commit messages as the git-log tool shows them (the newer first):
commit 9e0e485e50
Author: Martin Mares <mj@ucw.cz>
Date: Mon Apr 5 20:17:59 1999 +0000
Added some new protocol hooks (look at the comments for better explanation):
make_tmp_attrs Convert inline attributes to ea_list
store_tmp_attrs Convert ea_list to inline attributes
import_control Pre-import decisions
commit 5056c559c4
Author: Martin Mares <mj@ucw.cz>
Date: Mon Apr 5 20:15:31 1999 +0000
Changed syntax of attaching filters to protocols to hopefully the final
version:
EXPORT <filter-spec> for outbound routes (i.e., those announced
by BIRD to the rest of the world).
IMPORT <filter-spec> for inbound routes (i.e., those imported
by BIRD from the rest of the world).
where <filter-spec> is one of:
ALL pass all routes
NONE drop all routes
FILTER <name> use named filter
FILTER { <filter> } use explicitly defined filter
For all protocols, the default is IMPORT ALL, EXPORT NONE. This includes
the kernel protocol, so that you need to add EXPORT ALL to get the previous
configuration of kernel syncer (as usually, see doc/bird.conf.example for
a bird.conf example :)).
Let's say RIP to this almost 19-years-old inconsistency. For now, if you
import a route, it is always from protocol to table. If you export a
route, it is always from table to protocol.
And they lived happily ever after.
This is a fundamental change of an original (1999) concept of route
processing inside BIRD. During import/export, there was a temporary
ea_list created which was to be used instead of the another one inside
the route itself.
This led to some confusion, quirks, and strange filter code that handled
extended route attributes. Dropping it now.
The protocol interface has changed in an uniform way -- the
`struct ea_list *attrs` argument has been removed from store_tmp_attrs(),
import_control(), rt_notify() and get_route_info().
Many protocols do almost the same when creating a rte_update request
before calling rte_update2(). This commit should simplify the protocol
side of the route-creation routine.
The patch adds support for channels, structures connecting protocols and
tables and handling most interactions between them. The documentation is
missing yet.
New data types net_addr and variants (in lib/net.h) describing
network addresses (prefix/pxlen). Modifications of FIB structures
to handle these data types and changing everything to use these
data types instead of prefix/pxlen pairs where possible.
The commit is WiP, some protocols are not yet updated (BGP, Kernel),
and the code contains some temporary scaffolding.
Comments are welcome.
Allows to send and receive multiple routes for one network by one BGP
session. Also contains necessary core changes to support this (routing
tables accepting several routes for one network from one protocol).
It needs some more cleanup before merging to the master branch.
The nest-protocol interaction is changed to better handle multitable
protocols. Multitable protocols now declare that by 'multitable' field,
which tells nest that a protocol handles things related to proto-rtable
interaction (table locking, announce hook adding, reconfiguration of
filters) itself.
Filters and stats are moved to announce hooks, a protocol could have
different filters and stats to different tables.
The patch is based on one from Alexander V. Chernikov, thanks.
Hostcache is a structure for monitoring changes in a routing table that
is used for routes with dynamic/recursive next hops. This is needed for
proper iBGP next hop handling.
It seems that by adding one pipe-specific exception to route
announcement code and by adding one argument to rt_notify() callback i
could completely eliminate the need for the phantom protocol instance
and therefore make the code more straightforward. It will also fix some
minor bugs (like ignoring debug flag changes from the command line).
When uncofiguring the pipe and the peer table, the peer table was
unlocked when pipe protocol state changed to down/flushing and not to
down/hungry. This leads to the removal of the peer table before
the routes from the pipe were flushed.
The fix leads to adding some pipe-specific hacks to the nest,
but this seems inevitable.
used for automatic generation of instance names.
protocol->name is the official name
protocol->template is the name template (usually "name%d"),
should be all lowercase.
Updated all protocols to define the templates, checked that their configuration
grammar includes proto_name which generates the name and interns it in the
symbol table.
