[Olsr-users] olsrd-0.5.4rc1 released

[Bernd Petrovitsch]

Hi all!

I just released olsrd-0.5.4rc1. Due to the further massive changes (a
good part of it was rewritten) in the routing core to further reduce
duplicated data and *lots* of malloc() and free() calls (see the
changelog below for more), we ask for further testing and - thus - this
is a release candidate.
It compiles and runs on Linux and Win32 (though the testing on Win32 was
pretty minimal), so we are especially interested in feedback from all
non-Linux systems.
The only known issues are
- warnings on x86_64 in code only used by the nameservice plugin.
- the Quagga plugin is the last with the old plugin interface version.

A .tar.gz and a .tar.bz2 can be found on
http://bernd.petrovitsch.priv.at/olsr-ng/.

To quote from the changelog:
----  snip  ----
QUAGGA by Immo 'FaUl' Wehrenberg <(spam-protected)>
- updated to svn version 33

BMF PLUGIN  by Erik Tromp <(spam-protected)>
- updated to 1.5.1
- updated to latest plugin interfaces changes and killed warnings (by Bernd
  Petrovitsch <(spam-protected)>)

PATCH by Hannes Gredler <(spam-protected)> which rewrites the route handling.
To quote him:
----  snip  ----
change list:
- get rid of separate routing tables for HNA and per-node routes, everything is
  now unified in an AVL routing tree (&routingtree)

- introduce walking macros (OLSR_FOR_ALL_RT_ENTRIES()) that hide the internal
  structure of the RIB for making life of the plugin authors easier.

- get rid of different SPF implementations for LQ and non-LQ code paths. a
  non-LQ edge is simply substituted with a cost of 1.0

- get rid of host masks - a new data type olsr_prefix is introduced which is
  basically an ip address plus a prefix length.

  do not install the metric in the kernel FIB - for the kernel its pointless
  if the route gets installed with a metric of N or M.

  we do not need to update the kernel FIB if we have hop count only changes
  (for example if there is a reroute action further downstream)

  the only things which triggers a kernel FIB route update is a next hop
  change (a next hop is neighboring gateway router plus an interface).

  all OLSR routes are installed with a metric of 2

- separate between rt_entry and rt_path - the former is a route installed in the
  kernel with an next hop. the latter is a candidate for best path selection
  after SPF calculation has been done. in the rt_entry we keep a pointer to the
  best_path and also to the next hop that was installed in the kernel FIB.

  we always keep all originator of a route, if a route originator goes away we
  can easy recompute the best path for the route.

  the next hop in the rt_entry gets only updated upon a successful route_add
  call - that way we always remember what next hop to delete.

  stray routes should be history now.

- tweak the linked list toolkit to operate on circular lists.

- get rid of malloc calls for building the kernel update list. the list node is
  now embedded in the rt_entry.

- introduce three queues (add/chg/del) for kernel updates.

- for neighbor route dependency tracking the neighbor routes are queued first or
  last (depending on which queue you work on)

- rework all the plugins which directly manipulate rt entries.

- rework the plugins that read from the routing table (most notably nameserver,
  httpinfo and quagga plugin)

- lots of comments that explains the intentions and purpose of this code-piece.

non RT related stuff:
- use a list rather than a tree for storing the post-SPF results, which further
  improves the raw-SPF runtime.

- add display of SPF runtime (masked behind #ifdef SPF_PROFILING)
----  snip  ----
And Sven-Ola Tuecke <(spam-protected)> fixed an instability issue on interface
up/down operations (see 102-olsrd-rt-refactoring-fixes.patch below).

PATCH by Hannes Gredler <(spam-protected)> which "consolidates
the link-state database and the spf-calculation in order
to calculate routes more efficiently".
To quote him (more):
----  snip  ----
- use the link-state (tc) database for SPF calculations rather than
  replicating the notion of vertices and edges for a SPF run.
  this heavily reduces malloc() calls and shrinks the total CPU
  load of the route calculation path between 60%-80%.
----  snip  ----

PATCHES by Sven-Ola Tücke <(spam-protected)> to be found on from
http://download-master.berlin.freifunk.net/sven-ola/nylon/packages/olsrd/files/
- 102-olsrd-rt-refactoring-fixes.patch
  Because you changed a lot of basics: It's time to handle a general
  flaw in the routing system. Plase take a look at chk_if_changed(). This
  will free() any "struct interface" pointer without warning at any time.
  This is why it's possile to SEGV olsrd with a simple "ifdown xxx". 
  The patch replaces the (maybe) invalid pointer with an index reference
  "iif_index". You can always ask the OS for a name. Please note, that I do
  not have a working BSD toolchain, so I've placed an #error in the IPv6
  BSD-part where the author/porter has started to hack something funny.

- 110-olsrd-double-wlancard-neigh-hack.patch:
  This is a hack for Nodes having to wifi cards with the same channel,
  bssid, IP-Range etc. If two nodes can see each other by means of two
  possible links (here: two wifi cards with equal config), a bug is  triggered
  with the Neigh-is-SYM detections. This small little hack prevents this.

- 112-olsrd-nameservice-fixemptyname.patch:
  This is an addon to my lat/lon stuff which will prevent olsrd from
  running (oops?) if no hostname is given and the nameservice plugin
  is loaded.

- 113-olsrd-dyngwplain-pluginvers5.patch:
  This updates the dyngwplain plugin to the new Plugin Iface

- 140-olsrd-arprefreshed.patch:
  This is a new one. Opens a packet socket and listen to UDP(698), extract
  the sender MAC and refreshes the ARP cache whith that. Should speedup
  especially in cases, if you initially try to use a longer routing path which
  normally triggers a "ARP-Lookup-Chain".
- 106-olsrd-nameserviceparams.patch:
  This patch converts more plugins to the new interface version.
- 104-olsrd-policy-routing.patch
  Reworked this one to discard GPL helper functions. Also checked IPv6 and
  re-included the IPC hookup. The patch adds a "RtTable [number]" for
  /etc/olsrd.conf which is simply the Linux
  policy routing table to use. Defaults to 254 (== main). 
  This patch was modified/clenaed up by <(spam-protected)> to use "#if"
  instead of "#ifdef" as it's more robust against typos.

PATCH by Arnd Hannemann <(spam-protected)>
olsr_makefile_make_use_of_exename.patch
- This patch makes sure that the EXENAME variable of Makefile.inc is used
  in Makefile.

PATCHES by John Hay <(spam-protected)>
- update to new FreeBSD WLAN API
- do not require /bin/bash, use /bin/sh

PATCHES and CLEANUPS by Bernd Petrovitsch <(spam-protected)>
- Made a function from the ME_TO_DOUBLE() macro (in src/mantissa.h).
  This saves code throughout the code even on i386 and will even more
  on architectures without floating point units and "-msoft-float".
- And the mathemathics in src/mantissa.h is reformulated to minimize
  floating point operations to save CPU power - especially on embedded
  devices.
- I rewrote the half of src/lq_packet.[ch] which deals with incoming
  packets. This was triggered with performance output of gcc produced
  by Sven-Ola Tuecke at CCCamp07.
  This kills *lots* of (more than) superflous malloc()s and the same
  number of (free()s). And it also kills some code and copying around of
  data.

- converted the dyn_gw plugin to plugin interface version 5 (which leaves
  the quagga plugion as the last with the old one).
- paving the way to activate -Wshadow, much more to do
- const-ify parameters here and there
- use NULL for pointers (and not "0")
- Killed "extern" declarations in (not generated) .c files

- Based on a patch by Gianni Costanzi <(spam-protected)> (so credits
  and thanks have to go there):
  added OS_CFLAG_PTHREAD Makefile variable since gcc (on Linux) requests this
  in the manual page.
  Changes/additions:
  - I added definitions to all OS-specific Makefile.$OS with the value similar
    to the value in OS_LIB_PTHREAD (either empty or "-pthread").
  - The variable is added to CPPFLAGS (and not CFLAGS) since CPPFLAGS is used
    for all cpp and gcc calls (and gcc's man page indicates that it sets
    variables for both of them).
----  snip  ----
Have fun!

	Bernd
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