[Babel-users] Heads up: please test master!

[Juliusz Chroboczek]

Dear all,

The current master branch of babeld is scheduled to become babeld-1.9.0
really really soon.  It's been a long time coming, but I hope it will be
worth it.

The main news is that the output buffering logic has been largely
restructured so that it is now possible to run babeld using mostly Unicast
packets; this can be useful on networks with abysmally poor multicast
performance, and is a required feature for the DTLS branch.  See the
option "unicast" in the manual page.

A long-standing issue with babeld being too noisy at startup has been
identified by Teco Boot; babeld will no longer collapse your network when
large numbers of routers reboot at the same time (say, after a power outage).

Another long-standing issue has been identified by Dave Taht that caused
poor performance where huge numbers of routes were redistributed into
babel (tens of thousands).

Killian Lufau and Christof Schulze have added a feature that allows
setting the preferred source address in install filters.  This is useful
if you're running babeld on multihomed hosts, and the kernel chooses the
wrong address.

(In related news, the hmac branch is progressing quite nicely, and will
hopefully be ready in time for babeld-x, where x will be either 1.10.0 or
2.0.0.)

Please help us test the current master branch.

-- Juliusz