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Th3 Flock of Bird s#

DENOG 17 (Essen) digest Program Core pick Essen · 9–11 November 2025

Abstract Slides Recording

Marcel Fest

Play the recording: Th3 Flock of Bird s

  • Why: BIRD 3.x is a major release of the most widely-used open-source BGP daemon — directly relevant to the PM's BGP internals interest. The talk includes benchmark numbers comparing BIRD v1.6.8, v2.17.2, and v3.1.4.
  • What: An overview of BIRD's evolution and the v3.x changes: multithreaded execution, decoupled exports from imports, unified route attribute names, separate reload command for filters and protocols. Includes convergence benchmarks (using BNGBlaster as traffic generator in a testbed): 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 — suggesting a regression in C3). (from slides)
  • How: BIRD v3's multithreading and decoupled import/export paths are the main architectural changes. The benchmark methodology uses RTBrick's BNGBlaster project to generate BGP route feeds and measure convergence across three scenarios. The testbed is published on GitHub.
  • Where applicable: Any operator running BIRD as a route server, IXP fabric, or automation target. v3.x improvements matter most for high-scale route servers with many peers and large tables. The C3 regression suggests caution before upgrading to v3.1.4 for certain workload profiles.