This is a major change of how the filters are interpreted. If everything
works how it should, it should not affect you unless you are hacking the
filters themselves.
Anyway, this change should make a huge improvement in the filter performance
as previous benchmarks showed that our major problem lies in the
recursion itself.
There are also some changes in nest and protocols, related mostly to
spreading const declarations throughout the whole BIRD and also to
refactored dynamic attribute definitions. The need of these came up
during the whole work and it is too difficult to split out these
not-so-related changes.
The static filter state was messy and blocked the planned parallel
execution of filters. Anyway, this will be also slower as the state
structure must be passed almost everywhere with us.
For local route marking purposes, local custom route attributes may be
defined. These attributes are seamlessly stripped after export filter to
every real protocol like Kernel, BGP or OSPF, they however pass through
pipes. We currently allow at most 256 custom attributes.
This should be much faster than currently used bgp communities
for marking routes.
Use ACCESS_RTE to guard **f_rte, use ACCESS_EATTRS to guard **f_eattrs.
Use f_rta_cow() before writing to rta or eattrs, use f_rte_cow() before
writing preference (stored in rte).
Do not access eattrs indirectly through (*f_rte)->attrs->eattrs, it is
way too slow. The cached pointer is faster.
This is a fundamental change of an original (1999) concept of route
processing inside BIRD. During import/export, there was a temporary
ea_list created which was to be used instead of the another one inside
the route itself.
This led to some confusion, quirks, and strange filter code that handled
extended route attributes. Dropping it now.
The protocol interface has changed in an uniform way -- the
`struct ea_list *attrs` argument has been removed from store_tmp_attrs(),
import_control(), rt_notify() and get_route_info().
The bgpmask literals can include expressions. This is OK but they have
to be interpreted as soon as the code is run, not in the time the code
is used as value.
This led to strange behavior like rewriting bgpmasks when they shan't
be rewritten:
function mask_generator(int as)
{
return [= * as * =];
}
function another()
bgpmask m1;
bgpmask m2;
{
m1 = mask_generator(10);
m2 = mask_generator(20);
if (m1 == m2) {
print("strange"); # this would happen
}
}
Moreover, sending this to CLI would cause stack overflow and knock down the
whole BIRD, as soon as there is at least one route to execute the given
filter on.
show route filter bgpmask mmm; bgppath ppp; { ppp = +empty+; mmm = [= (ppp ~ mmm) =]; print(mmm); accept; }
The magic match operator (~) inside the bgpmask literal would try to
resolve mmm, which points to the same bgpmask so it would resolve
itself, call the magic match operator and vice versa.
After this patch, the bgpmask literal will get resolved as soon as it's
assigned to mmm and it also will return a type error as bool is not
convertible to ASN in BIRD.
This instruction was removed in the commit linked below
and never used ever again. Rest in peace.
commit 84c7e1943f
Author: Pavel Machek <pavel@ucw.cz>
Date: Tue Mar 2 19:49:28 1999 +0000
It was supposed to do tail-recursion in interpret() but it didn't
compile as such. Converting it to loop makes a significant filter
performance improvement for flat filters.
The two-letter instructions were quite messy but they could be easily
read from memory dumps. Now GDB (since 2012) supports pretty printing
enum values and GCC checks the switch construction for missing enum
values so we are converting the nice two-byte values to enums.
Anyway, the enum still keeps the old two-byte values to be able to read
the instruction codes even without GDB from plain memory dump.
A filter should log messages only if executed explicitly (e.g., during
route export or route import). When a filter is executed for technical
reasons (e.g., to establish whether a route was exported before), it
should run silently.
