OpenBGPD turns 10 years
Channel: Andrea Ross
Date: 2014-05-19

Design, Implementation, Lessons learned


The Border Gateway Protocol, BGP, is used on the internet between ISPs to announce reachability of networks. Routers build their routing tables using this information. The global IPv4 routing table has about 470000 entries today.

In 2004, I was upset enough with the implementation we were using back then, zebra, to start writing an own one. After showing an early prototype other developers jumped in and helped. Quickly thereafter we had a working BGP implementation that not only I have used ever since then. We'll look at OpenBGPD's design and how it differs from other implementations, the frameworks established and later used for other purposes, and the lessons we learned over the last 10 years.