VyOS Networks Blog

While VyOS 1.2.0 nightly builds have been fairly usable for a while already, there are still some things to be done because we can make a named release candidate from it. These are the things that have been done lately:

EC2 AMI scripts retargeting and clean up

The original AMI build scripts had been virtually unchanged since their original implementation in 2014, and by this time they've had ansible warnings at every other step, which prompted us to question everything they do, and we did. This resulted in a big spring cleanup of those scripts, and now they are way shorter, faster, and robust.

Other than the fact that they now work with VyOS 1.2.0 properly, one of the biggest improvements from the user point of view is that it's now easy to build an AMI with a custom config file simply by editing the file at playbooks/templates/config.boot.default.ec2

The primary motivation for it was to replace cumbersome in-place editing of the config.boot.default from the image with a single template, but in the end it's a win-win solution for both developers and users.

The original scripts were also notorious for their long execution time and fragility. What's worse is that when they failed (and it's usually "when" rather than "if"), they would leave behind a lot of gargabe they couldn't automatically clean up, since they used to create a temporary VPC complete with an internet gateway, subnet, and route table, all just for a single build instance. They also used a t2.medium instance that was clearly oversized for the task and could be expensive to leave running if clean up failed.

Now they create the build instance in the first available subnet of the default VPC, so even if they fail, you only need to delete a t2.micro instance, a key pair, and a security group.

It is no longer possible to build VyOS 1.1.x images with those scripts from the baseline code, but I've created a tag named 1.1.x from the last commit where it was possible, so you can do it if you want to — without these recent improvements of course.

Package upgrades and new drivers

We've upgraded StrongSWAN to 5.6.2, which hopefully will fix a few longstanding issues. Some enthusiastic testers are already testing it, but everyone is invited to test it as well.

SR-IOV is now basically a requirement for high performance virtualized networking, and it needs appropriate drivers. Recent nightly builds include a newer version of Intel's ixgbe and Mellanox OFED drivers, so the support for recent 10gig cards and SR-IOV in particular has improved.

A step towards using the master branch again

The "current" git branch we use throughout the project where everyone else uses "master" was never intended to be a permanent setup: it always was a workaround for the master branch in packages inherited from Vyatta Core being messed up beyond any repair. It will take quite some time to get rid of the "current" branch completely and we'll only be able to do it when we finally consolidate all the code under vyos-1x, but we've made jenkins builds correctly put the packages built from the "master" branch in our development repository, so we'll be able to do it for packages that do not include any legacy code at least.

IPv6 VRRP status

This is the most interesting part. IPv6 VRRP is perhaps a single most awaited feature. Originally it was blocked by lack of support for it in keepalived. Now keepalived supports it, but integrating it will need some backwards-incompatible changes.

Originally, keepalived allowed mixing IPv4 and IPv6 in the same group, but it no longer allows it (curiously, the protocol standard does allow IPv4 advertisments over IPv6 transport, but I can see why they may want to keep these separate). This means to take advantage of the improvements it made, we also have to disallow it, thus breaking the configs of people who attempted to use it. We've been thinking about keeping the old syntax while generating different configs from it, or automated migration, but it's not clear if automated migration is really feasible.

An incompatible syntax change is definitely needed because, for example, if we want to support setting hello source address or unicast VRRP peer address for both IPv4 and IPv6, we obviously need separate options.

Soon IPv6 addresses in IPv4 VRRP groups will be disallowed and syntax for IPv6-only VRRP groups will be added alongside the old vrrp-group syntax. If you have ideas for the new syntax, the possible automated migration, or generally how to make the transition smooth, please comment on the relevant task.

PowerDNS recursor instead of dnsmasq

The old dnsmasq (which I, frankly, always viewed as something of a spork, with its limited DHCP server functionality built into what's mainly a caching DNS resolver), has been replaced with PowerDNS recursor, a much cleaner implementation.