Introduction

As of last year, there was effectively only a single solution in the Route Server vendor market: the BIRD Internet routing daemon. NIC.CZ (the organisation developing BIRD) has done fantastic work on maintaining their BGP-4 implementation, however, it’s not healthy to have virtually every Internet Exchange Point (IXP) in the RIPE NCC service region depend on a single open source project. The current situation can be compared to the state of the DNS root nameservers back in 2002 - their dependence on the BIND nameserver daemon and the resulting development of NSD as an alternative by NLnet, in cooperation with the RIPE NCC.

OpenBGPD used to be one of the most popular Route Server implementations until the early 2010s. OpenBGPD's main problem was that its performance couldn’t keep up with the Internet's growth, so it lost market share. An analysis by Job Snijders suggested that a modernised OpenBGPD distribution would be a most viable option to regain diversity on the Route Server level.

Missing features in OpenBGPD

The following main missing features were identified in OpenBGPD: