Day 1 / Track 3 / Talk 4 Talk – Nuts-n-Bolts: An Asynchronous Dataplane for FRR Speakers: Mark Stapp Report by: Donald Sharp
This session was a follow-up from the previous FRR workshop and discussed the asynchronous data-plane / zebra.
The presenter was from voltanet.io, however it was not the coder himself. The talk begun with the ZAPI - API between zebra and routing daemons. Now it has one thread per client in ZEBRA. This was followed by asynchronous communication with FIB. E.g.: remote switch (voltanet). There are two threads now: zebra-main, zebra-dplane connected by two queues. The zebra dataplane talks with “kernel”. The ACK path (installed in HW) is only used by sharpd (installs 1 million routes, testing daemon), but needed for BGP, RIP according to Donald.
A comment from cumulus linux, there is currently no feedback from linux-kernel when route is installed onto ASIC (eg: broadcom). Kiran asked whether the dataplane deamon could expand to directly use chip API to install routes, not relying on linux-kernel driver doing it. The answer was yes. Toerless then asked to change nexthop-group-members? Donald replied that it's not there yet.
Site: https://www.netdevconf.info/0x13/session.html?talk-FRR-async