[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