[Xorp-hackers] Status of XORP

[Atanu Ghosh]

Hi,

    Ghazan> How usable and reliable is Xorp compared to Gated, Quagga
    Ghazan> and Zebra? The module status page says various modules are
    Ghazan> complete or almost complete. Does it mean it has recently
    Ghazan> been 'completed' but not tested so still Alpha, or complete
    Ghazan> as in just install it on a server, drop the server in a
    Ghazan> network and there you go?  Where does it stand compared to
    Ghazan> the other three? (sure give me biased opnions but informed
    Ghazan> ones).

XORP is the newest of the available options. My understanding is that
Gated in longer under active development. Quagga is still under active
development being newer than XORP it currently has more features. XORP
provides multicast routing which is not available in Quagga/Zebra. We
considered multicast and IPv6 to be as important as IPv4.

The completed components have been tested and you will find regression
tests (gmake check) in the source tree. All the IPv6 (Unicast and
Multicast) and some of the IPv4 connectivity for our site will be going
through a XORP router very soon. We have in the past run all of the XORP
traffic through a XORP router and are about to again. Obviously there
may still be problems but we are confident enough to run the code
ourselves.

    Ghazan> With Quagga, I've been trying to compile it on a minimal
    Ghazan> Linux system for my 7 sparcstations, so I could boot them as
    Ghazan> tftpboot image, which may not be over 8mb. Elsewhere on this
    Ghazan> mailinglist I saw the installed base of XORP was 38MB. What
    Ghazan> goes into 38MB since projects like these have no 'content'
    Ghazan> and its all binaries? The Linux kernel is 2MB at best with
    Ghazan> all that functionality...

A number of factors account for the large amount of disk space that is
consumed. The binaries themselves are not stripped and with debugging
information they can take a lot of disk space. Also we used to in the
past build all the regression test binaries, we have a lot of regression
tests. We are experimenting with shared libraries to try and reduce the
memory footprint.

    Ghazan> Lastly has anyone compiled XORP for embedded systems?  I saw
    Ghazan> two threads regarding ramspace, but none regarding
    Ghazan> diskspace. Is it reasonable to compile XORP for sparc, and
    Ghazan> expect all the binaries and libraries to be less than 5mb?

I believe this has been answered.

  Atanu.