[Babel-users] ANNOUNCE: babel-0.95

[Juliusz Chroboczek]

Dear all,

Version 0.95 of the Babel routing daemon is available from

    http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~jch/software/files/babel-0.95.tar.gz
    http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~jch/software/files/babel-0.95.tar.gz.asc

For more information about Babel, please see

    http://www.pps.jussieu.fr/~jch/software/babel/

This version contains a number of important bug fixes, and upgrading is
strongly recommended.  Thanks to the /tmp/lab team and to Harald Geyer
for providing me with the packet dumps that allowed me to find these.

The most serious of those is a bug in parsing IHU packets, which broke
link-quality estimation and caused spurious network instability.  Fixing
this bug reduced Babel's traffic by up to fourfold (!) in some topologies;
reduction by 40% is typical.  I am deeply ashamed of this, so please don't
rub it in.

Less serious, retractions were not being sent as often as called for.
This could cause transient blackholes to appear, and remain for half the
update interval on average.  Another retraction-related bug would
prevent retractions from being sent when an external route was retracted
(this shouldn't matter in practice).

A couple of user-visible features, too.  The silent time is no longer
imposed at startup; instead, we send a bunch of retractions, and hope
everything goes well.

Finally, the update interval is no longer a global value, it's
a per-interface characteristic, and can be changed by tweaking the
config file.  The default update interval is computed differently, and
is larger for wired linkes than for wireless ones.

Sorry for the bugs, and enjoy this version,

                                        Juliusz

21 April 2009: babel 0.95

  * Fixed a bug that broke link-quality estimation, and could cause
    severe instability when we had both good and marginal neighbours.
  * We now send retractions after a redistributed route is retracted.
  * Fixed a bug that could cause reliable messages (retractions and
    router-id switches) to only be sent twice.
  * We no longer obey a silent time at startup, instead sending a bunch of
    retractions.  The silent time is inconvenient, but seldom useful.
  * Updates for routes to self are now sent together with other updates
    (they used to be sent more frequently).
  * Fixes the configuration parser to interpret hello-interval as a number
    of seconds, as specified in the documentation (it used to be interpreted
    as a number of milliseconds).
  * INCOMPATIBLE CHANGE: the update interval is now a per-interface value,
    may be configured manually in the configuraton file, and defaults to
    4 times the hello interval.  The -u flag is gone.
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