[FROG] Current state of MPLS for FRR?

David Lamparter david at opensourcerouting.org
Thu May 18 07:28:09 EDT 2017


Hi William,


[bits inline]

On Tue, May 16, 2017 at 08:14:09PM -0600, William George wrote:
> Looking at the docs on https://frrouting.org/ it's not *exactly* clear what
> the current state is.  I notice in the tests for LDP, there's a number of
> "all-fails", but I'm not familiar enough w/ the protocol to know whether
> those are strictly necessary for a working implementation.

It's on par with the test failures we see on well-working, reliable
protocols.  Some of the tests are simply very strict and the
implementation may be a bit too forgiving;  some are just things that
aren't implemented -- and some are probably bugs ;).

I've sucessfully run ldpd against an Extreme Networks switch, but I'm a
developer so this isn't a deployment where I would notice hidden issues.

Also note that FRR ldpd is (99%) the same as OpenBSD ldpd, which is
pretty well-tested AFAIK.

> I was going to add that I wasn't sure if the "vpnv4" address family was
> supported but I found this
> <https://frrouting.org/user-guide/BGP-Address-Family.html#index-show-ip-bgp-vpnv4-all>.
> It explicitly calls out the supported RFCs, so I guess we're good there
> (though it should probably be noted in the "supported RFCs" page.  If the
> contribution process is simple enough I'll probably submit a pull request).

This is relatively new and if you check the issue tracker you'll see a
few open issues on it.  We'd be happy to get feedback, but keep it in a
lab for now ;)

(The "new" bits are the pieces that actually put MPLS labels into the
RIB & FIB -- the address family support has been there for 10+ years.)

> So the BGP support seems to be there, and LDP seems "mostly" complete,
> whatever that means.  Does that mean FRR can actually integrate with a
> functioning MPLS network?  How "production ready" should this be considered?

LDP should be production ready, the BGP pieces not quite just yet.  It's
moving pretty rapidly though!

> Similarly, though I know this isn't exactly the responsibility of FRR, can
> anyone give me an idea of the state of open hardware support for MPLS?
> From what I've seen so far, it's actually rather lacking, but I'm not
> confident I'm looking in the right places.  Last thing I want to do is add
> an MPLS node that's going to punt every MPLS frame to CPU or something :)

I unfortunately have no idea on this.  FRR uses the system interfaces
for MPLS on Linux and OpenBSD.  You may need to buy some vendor's
devices that come accompanied by closed-source kernel<>hw layers ;)

(There's work ongoing in the Linux kernel on switch silicon drivers, but
last I checked - half a year ago - this didn't include MPLS.)

Cheers,


-David



More information about the frog mailing list