[Xorp-hackers] Announcing XORP Release Candidate 1.1

Atanu Ghosh atanu@ICSI.Berkeley.EDU
Mon, 28 Mar 2005 12:41:41 -0800


On behalf of the entire XORP team, I'm delighted to announce the XORP
1.1 Release Candidate, which is now available from <http://www.xorp.org>.

Once the release candidate has proven to be stable, the actual 1.1
release will be prepared. This is planned to occur in the next two
weeks. In the intervening period we will be fixing minor problems and
updating the documentation.

There are still a number of non-critical bugs that we know about which
will not be addressed until the 1.2 release; these are documented in
the errata section below.

In general, to test XORP, we run automated regression tests on a daily
basis with various operating systems and compilers. We also run a
number of PCs as XORP routers. We have enabled as many protocols as
feasible on those routers to test protocol interactions (for example a
BGP IPv6 multicast feed being used by PIM-SM). In addition, automated
scripts are run to externally toggle BGP peerings. Finally, we have
automated scripts that interact directly with the xorpsh to change the
configuration settings.

We have put significant effort into testing but obviously we have not
found all the problems. This is where you can help us to make XORP
more stable, by downloading and using it!

As always we'd welcome your comments - xorp-users@xorp.org is the
right place for general discussion, and private feedback to the XORP
core team can be sent to feedback@xorp.org.

 - The XORP Team

P.S.
Release notes and errata are included below.

------------------------------------------------------------------
		XORP RELEASE NOTES

This file contains XORP release notes (most recent releases first).

Release 1.1-RC (2005/03/24)
=========================
  ALL:
    - Numerous improvements, bug fixes and cleanup.

    - XORP now builds on amd64+OpenBSD-3.6-current.

    - The --enable-advanced-mcast-api flag to "./configure" has been
      replaced  with the --disable-advanced-multicast-api flag.

    - Addition of support for code execution profiling.

    - Currently "gmake" does not build the regression tests.
      The command "gmake check" should be used to build and run the
      regression tests.

    - Addition of two new documents:
      * "An Introduction to Writing a XORP Process"
      * "XORP User Manual"

  CONFIGURATION:
    - All "enabled: true/false" XORP configuration flags are now
      renamed to "disable: false/true".

    - The syntax for configuring the IPv4/IPv6 forwarding has changed:

      OLD:
      fea {
          enable-unicast-forwarding4: true
          enable-unicast-forwarding6: true
      }

      NEW:
      fea {
          unicast-forwarding4 {
              disable: false
          }

          unicast-forwarding6 {
              disable: false
          }
      }

    - The syntax for configuring the AFI/SAFI combinations in BGP has
      changed:

      OLD:
      bgp {
          peer <peer_name> {
              enable-ipv4-multicast
              enable-ipv6-unicast
              enable-ipv6-multicast
          }
      }

      NEW:
      bgp {
          peer <peer_name> {
              ipv4-unicast: true
              ipv4-multicast: true
              ipv6-unicast: true
              ipv6-multicast: true
          }
      }
      The new syntax allows IPv4 unicast to be disabled which was not
      previously possible.

  LIBXORP:
    - Bug fix in ordering events scheduled at exactly the same time
      and expiring at exactly the same time.

    - Various improvements to the eventloop implementation.

    - Addition of a mechanism for buffered asynchronous reads and writes.

  LIBXIPC:
    - Addition of XRL pipelining support.

    - The Finder client address can be defined by the following variable
      in the environment: XORP_FINDER_CLIENT_ADDRESS. This re-enables
      communicating with remote XORP processes.

    - Various other improvements (including performance) and bug fixes.

  LIBFEACLIENT:
    - Few bug fixes.

  XRL:
    - No significant changes.

  RTRMGR:
    - Addition of a new rtrmgr template keyword:
      %deprecated: "Reason".
      This keyword can be used to deprecate old configuration statements.

    - Addition of a new rtrmgr keyword: %update.
      It is similar to %activate, and is called whenever the configuration
      in the subtree has changed.

    - Modification to the rtrmgr template semantics: the XRLs per template
      nodes are sent in the order those nodes are declared in the template
      files. Previously, the order was alphabetical (by the name of the
      template nodes).

    - Various other improvements and bug fixes.

  XORPSH:
    - Addition of a mechanism to track the status of the modules, and
      to provide operational commands for only those modules that are
      running.

    - Various other improvements and bug fixes.

  POLICY:
    - Initial implementation of a policy manager. It is still being tested,
      and should not be used.

  FEA/MFEA:
    - Implementation of Click FEA support.

    - Addition of support for discard interfaces and discard routes.

    - Addition of support for ACLs, though currently there is no mechanism
      to configure them through the XORP configuration file.

    - Initial support for raw sockets.

    - Various bug fixes, improvements and cleanup.

  RIB:
    - Bug fix in adding point-to-point network interfaces.

    - Removal of the old mechanism (ExportTable) for propagating
      the routes to the FEA and all other interested parties.

    - Removal of hard-wired "static" table.

    - Various other improvements and bug fixes.

  RIP:
    - MD5 authentication now works properly. Previously, it was generating
      the wrong signature.

    - Cisco compatibility bug fix.

  BGP:
    - Addition of support for creating IPv6 TCP connections.

    - Few bug fixes in the Multi-protocol support.

    - Major improvements to the flow control mechanism.

    - Various improvements and bug fixes.

  STATIC_ROUTES:
    -  Addition of configuration support for interface-specific static
       routes.

    - Improvements in handling stored routes if they are affected by
      network interface information updates.

    - Addition of support for tracking the state of the relevant
      processes, and for graceful registering/deregistering with them.

    - Addition of support for better checking of the XRL error codes.

    - Few other improvements and bug fixes.

  MLD/IGMP:
    - Bug fix in updating the primary address of an interface.

    - Addition of support for tracking the state of the relevant
      processes, and for graceful registering/deregistering with them.

    - Addition of support for better checking of the XRL error codes.

    - Few other improvements and bug fixes.

  PIM-SM:
    - Bug fixes in handling the MRIB entries and MRIB-related state.

    - Bug fix in scheduling the internal PimMre tasks.

    - Bug fix in updating the primary address of an interface.

    - Bug fix in the computation of the checksum of PIM Register packages
      received from a Cisco router that itself is not spec-compliant in the
      checksum computation.

    - Addition of support for tracking the state of the relevant
      processes, and for graceful registering/deregistering with them.

    - Addition of support for better checking of the XRL error codes.

    - Various other bug fixes, improvements and cleanup.

  FIB2MRIB:
    - Bug fix in deleting the Fib2Mrib entries.

    - Improvements in handling stored routes if they are affected by
      network interface information updates.

    - Addition of support for tracking the state of the relevant
      processes, and for graceful registering/deregistering with them.

    - Addition of support for better checking of the XRL error codes.

    - Few other bug fixes and improvements.

  CLI:
    - Bug fix in <SPACE> auto-completion for sub-commands.

    - Few other bug fixes and improvements.

  SNMP:
    - No significant changes.

------------------------------------------------------------------
		XORP ERRATA

  ALL:
    - Parallel building (e.g., "gmake -j 4") may fail on multi-CPU machines.
      The simplest work-around is to rerun gmake or not to use the -j flag.

    - The following compiler is known to be buggy, and should not be used
      to compile XORP:
          gcc34 (GCC) 3.4.0 20040310 (prerelease) [FreeBSD]
      A newer compiler such as the following should be used instead:
          gcc34 (GCC) 3.4.2 20040827 (prerelease) [FreeBSD]

    - If you run BGP, RIB, FIB2MRIB, and PIM-SM at the same time,
      the propagation latency for the BGP routes to reach the kernel
      is increased. We are investigating the problem.

  LIBXORP:
    - No known issues.

  LIBXIPC:
    - No known issues.

  LIBFEACLIENT:
    - No known issues.

  XRL:
    - No known issues.

  RTRMGR:
    - There are several known issues, but none of them is considered critical.
      The list of known issues is available from
      http://www.xorp.org/bugzilla/query.cgi

    - Using the rtrmgr "-r" command-line option to restart processes that
      have failed does not work if a process fails while being reconfigured
      via xorpsh. If that happens, the rtrmgr itself may coredump.
      Therefore, using the "-r" command-line option is not recommended!
      Also, note that a process that has been killed by SIGTERM or SIGKILL
      will not be restarted (this is a feature rather than a bug).
      Ideally, we want to monitor the processes status using the finder
      rather than the forked children process status, therefore in
      the future when we have a more robust implementation the "-r"
      switch will be removed and will be enabled by default.

  XORPSH:
    - There are several known issues, but none of them is considered critical.
      The list of known issues is available from
      http://www.xorp.org/bugzilla/query.cgi

  FEA/MFEA:
    - On Linux with kernel 2.6 (e.g., RedHat FC2 with kernel 2.6.5-1.358),
      some of the tests may fail (with or without an error message),
      but no coredump image. Some of those failures can be contributed
      to a kernel problem. E.g., running "dmesg can show kernel
      "Oops" messages like:

Unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at virtual address 00000000
 printing eip:
02235532
*pde = 00000000
Oops: 0000 [#15]
CPU:    0
EIP:    0060:[<02235532>]    Not tainted
EFLAGS: 00010202   (2.6.5-1.358) 
EIP is at __dev_get_by_index+0x14/0x2b
eax: 022db854   ebx: 1ae7aef8   ecx: 00000001   edx: 00000000
esi: 00000000   edi: 00008910   ebp: fee43e9c   esp: 1ae7aef0
ds: 007b   es: 007b   ss: 0068
Process test_finder_eve (pid: 2026, threadinfo=1ae7a000 task=1406d7b0)
Stack: 022365c7 00000000 009caffc 009cc780 0969ef28 fee43edc 00000001 009cc780 
       0969ef28 fee43ed8 00008910 00000000 00008910 fee43e9c 02236e50 fee43e9c 
       07aa4e00 3530355b 5d303637 00000000 0227a55b 021536b6 022cfa00 00000001 
Call Trace:
 [<022365c7>] dev_ifname+0x30/0x66
 [<02236e50>] dev_ioctl+0x83/0x283
 [<0227a55b>] unix_create1+0xef/0xf7
 [<021536b6>] alloc_inode+0xf9/0x175
 [<0227c090>] unix_ioctl+0x72/0x7b
 [<022301a5>] sock_ioctl+0x268/0x280
 [<0223054f>] sys_socket+0x2a/0x3d
 [<0214ea0e>] sys_ioctl+0x1f2/0x224

Code: 0f 18 02 90 2d 34 01 00 00 39 48 34 74 08 85 d2 89 d0 75 ea 

      This appears to be a kernel bug triggered by ioctl(SIOCGIFNAME)
      which itself is called by if_indextoname(3). Currently, there
      is no known solution of the problem except to use a kernel that does
      not have the problem (at this stage it is not known whether all
      2.6 Linux kernels are affected or only specific versions).
      It seems that a very similar problem has been reported to the
      Linux kernel developers, but the problem is still unsolved:

      https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=121697

  RIB: 
    - In some rare cases, the RIB may fail to delete an existing route
      (See http://www.xorp.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=62).
      We are aware of the issue and will attempt to fix it in the future.

  RIP:
    - No known issues.

  BGP:
    - If the RIB bug above (failure to delete an existing route) is
      triggered by BGP, then the deletion failure error received by
      BGP from the RIB is considered by BGP as a fatal error.
      This is not a BGP problem, but a RIB problem that will be fixed
      in the future.

    - The BGP configuration mandates that an IPv4 nexthop must be supplied.
      Unfortunately it is necessary to provide an IPv4 nexthop even for an
      IPv6 only peering. Even more unfortunately it is not possible to force
      the IPv6 nexthop.

    - It is *essential* for an IPv6 peering that an IPv6 nexthop is provided.
      Unfortunately the configuration does not enforce this requrement.
      This will be fixed in the future.

  STATIC_ROUTES:
    - No known issues.
      
  MLD/IGMP:
    - If MLD/IGMP is started with a relatively large number of interfaces
      (e.g., on the order of 20), then it may fail with the following error:

        [ 2004/06/14 12:58:56  ERROR test_pim:16548 MFEA +666
        mfea_proto_comm.cc join_multicast_group ] Cannot join group 224.0.0.2
        on vif eth8: No buffer space available

      The solution is to increase the multicast group membership limit.
      E.g., to increase the value from 20 (the default) to 200, run as a root:

        echo 200 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/igmp_max_memberships

  PIM-SM:
    - If the kernel does not support PIM-SM, or if PIM-SM is not enabled
      in the kernel, then running PIM-SM will fail with the following
      error message:
        [ 2004/06/12 10:26:41  ERROR xorp_fea:444 MFEA +529 mfea_mrouter.cc
        start_mrt ] setsockopt(MRT_INIT, 1) failed: Operation not supported

    - On Linux, if the unicast Reverse Path Forwarding information is
      different from the multicast Reverse Path Forwarding information,
      the Reverse Path Filtering should be disabled. E.g., as root:

        echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/all/rp_filter
      OR
        echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/eth0/rp_filter
        echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/eth1/rp_filter
        ...

      Otherwise, the router will ignore packets if they don't arrive on
      the reverse-path interface.
      For more information about Reverse Path Filtering see
      http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Adv-Routing-HOWTO/lartc.kernel.rpf.html

  FIB2MRIB:
    - No known issues.

  CLI:
    - No known issues.

  SNMP:
    - On some versions of Linux, there are some bugs in net-snmp versions
      5.0.8 and 5.0.9, which prevent dynamic loading from working.
      See http://www.xorp.org/snmp.html for links to the net-snmp patches
      that solve the problems.

    - Version 5.1 of net-snmp requires a simple modification, otherwise
      XORP will fail to compile.
      See http://www.xorp.org/snmp.html for a link to the net-snmp patch
      that solves the problems.