Re: [LibreQoS] routing protocols and daemons

[Juliusz Chroboczek <jch@irif.fr>]

> found babel, corresponded with (and frankly thoroughly annoyed) the
> author,

Being said author, I can confirm that you did thoroughly annoy me.  But
then, you also made me think.

> Babel is so simple that toke wrote a near complete implementation from
> the spec, in python, during a string of extremely boring IETF
> meetings, over the course of a week. He later took on the bird port.

This is not correct.  Babel was first reimplemented in Python during two
nights during an IETF meeting by Markus Stenberg.  As to Toke, he did the
BIRD reimplementation in C during a Battlemesh meeting, and it took him
a whole four days.  I later did a minimal implementation in C, which
compiled to 20kB of x86 code.

> I forget what happened to toke's python version).

Markus Stenberg's.  It's still available, but fairly obsolete due to
advances in babeld and BIRD.

  https://github.com/fingon/pybabel

> Althea is using babel and fq_codel in their blockchain routing thing
> (I reserve comment), and I don't know where else, besides as part of
> wireguard tunnels, babel is being used today.

Now that Babel is no longer a legitimate research project, the main user
and main source of funding for Babel are Nexedi, who use it in their
distributed cloud

  https://www.nexedi.com/

But I agree with you, Dave, Babel did not take over the world.  The main
reason, I suspect, is that OSPF is very good, and that most people are
happy enough with it.

Notwithstanding that, we're still maintaining both the standalone babeld
and Toke's BIRD module, and we've been busy extending the protocol with
source-specific routing, with v4-via-v6 routing, with MAC protection.

-- Juliusz