BIRD vs Quagga

Wed Feb 17 05:50:29 UTC 2010

On 2010-02-16, at 19:53, Tomas L. Byrnes wrote:

> There's significant theoretical work, backed up with lots of practical
> experience connecting a lot more nodes in real time in a lot more places
> than the Internet currently does, that posits that the control and
> forwarding plane should actually ALWAYS be separate, and control higher
> priority, so that state management converges faster than the dataflows.
> 
> I'd like to see the countervailing, peer reviewed, references.

I have no shortage of anecdotes where a non-trivial layer-2 topology at an exchange point has left my router and provider X's router both able to talk to a route server, but unable to talk to each other directly. Since the NEXT_HOP on routes we each learnt from the route server pointed at an address we couldn't talk to, the result was a black hole.

So while your theoretical work might well have substantial merit, its application to the example at hand seems potentially lacking.

I am somewhat intrigued at this network you mention with which people have practical experience that has more nodes than the Internet does, though. That'd be quite a network.

Joe