BGP Graceful Restart

Fri Apr 16 22:48:21 UTC 2021

On Fri, Apr 16, 2021 at 11:09 AM Graham Johnston
<johnston.grahamj at gmail.com> wrote:
> Largely, I suspect that his point was that if you otherwise do the
> right things during maintenance that graceful-restart has the
> potential of being really problematic if things go wrong, and thus he
> was discouraging the use of it. Is there consensus as to whether
> graceful-restart has any place in a service provider network?

RFC4724 Graceful Restart is used to retain BGP routes where forwarding
plane is NOT disrupted. It can be useful for things that don't have
any alternative path to reduce exposure to control plane outages (e.g.
process restart).
Also sending End of Rib marker (not necessarily enabling GR) can be
helpful to troubleshoot BGP route collection (clear signal on
completion of initial convergence).

There is also LLGR https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-idr-long-lived-gr-00