Th3 Flock of Bird s#

Marcel Fest

• Why: BIRD 3.x is a major architectural release (multithreaded, decoupled import/export) of the most widely-used open-source BGP daemon. This talk provides concrete convergence benchmark numbers comparing v1.6.8, v2.17.2, and v3.1.4 — directly relevant to BGP control plane evaluation.
• What: An overview of BIRD's evolution with performance benchmarks. v3.1.4 brings multithreaded execution, decoupled exports from imports, unified route attribute names, and separate reload for filters vs protocols. Benchmarks (using RTBrick's BNGBlaster in a published testbed) show convergence times: v1.6.8 (C1: 7s, C2: 6s, C3: 3s), v2.17.2 (C1: 5s, C2: 2s, C3: 4s), v3.1.4 (C1: 4s, C2: 2s, C3: 7s). The C3 regression for v3.1.4 (7s vs 3s in v1.6.8) is the notable outlier and a caution flag before upgrading.
• How: The benchmark uses BNGBlaster as a traffic generator feeding BGP sessions and measuring convergence across three scenarios; the testbed configuration is published on GitHub (rtbrick/BGP-CP-DP-Testing) for reproduction.
• Where applicable: Any operator running BIRD as a route server, IXP infrastructure component, or automation target. The v3 multithreading matters most for high-scale route servers with many peers and large tables. The C3 regression suggests scenario-specific testing before upgrading to v3.1.4.