[Babel-users] Babel with VPP

[Pim van Pelt]

Hoi folks,

By means of introduction, I'm Pim and in my spare time I work on fd.io 
<http://fd.io>'s Vector Packet Processor. I wanted to thank you for your 
excellent work on Babel. Juliusz, Toke and Warren, for your inspiration 
with v4-via-v6, and Juliusz, for your clear description of Babel, and 
Ondrej for your help shepherding the implementation into Bird and 
merging the RFC9229 commit.

I finished a few small code changes in VPP to allow transit-net-less 
transport of IPv4 and IPv6 in VPP and wrote about it on 
https://ipng.ch/s/articles/2024/03/06/vpp-babel-1.html 
<https://ipng.ch/s/articles/2024/03/06/vpp-babel-1.html>. Considering 
this dataplane has some different idioms than Linux, it took a bit of work.

I thought you might find this VPP + Bird2 + Babel story from the field 
interesting. I wanted to ask you to read the article, and in particular 
the /Additional thoughts/ section at the bottom, as it tries to ask for 
opinions on a somewhat complex topic of unnumbered point-to-point 
interfaces in VPP.

There will be another article in a few months, once I decide to move 
AS8298 from OSPF/OSPFv3 to Babel, and retire all of the /31 and /112 
transit networks. If I might take the opportunity to ask two questions --

AS8298 has a ring from Zurich, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Lille, Paris and 
Geneva. Our links are carrier ethernet from a telco. Sometimes, when the 
underlying links fail, the underlay MPLS network will recover and route 
around the failed telco link, and I'll see latency on my own service go 
from say 6ms ZRH-FRA to 40ms ZRH-FRA; I thought this would be an 
excellent use case for Babel.
1) Is there any advice you could offer for rtt cost/min/max/decay values 
when using Bird2 ?
2) any words of wisdom before I move from an OSPF v2/v3 IGP to Babel in 
a running network ? Does anybody on this list have operational 
experience to share ?

groet from AS8298,
Pim
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://alioth-lists.debian.net/pipermail/babel-users/attachments/20240310/45002e34/attachment.htm>