PATHD Internals

Architecture

Overview

The pathd deamon manages the segment routing policies, it owns the data structures representing them and can load modules that manipulate them like the PCEP module. Its responsibility is to select a candidate path for each configured policy and to install it into Zebra.

Zebra

Zebra manages policies that are active or pending to be activated due to the next hop not being available yet. In zebra, policy data structures and APIs are defined in zebra_srte.[hc].

The responsibilities of Zebra are:

  • Store the policies’ segment list.

  • Install the policies when their next-hop is available.

  • Notify other daemons of the status of the policies.

Adding and removing policies is done using the commands ZEBRA_SR_POLICY_SET and ZEBRA_SR_POLICY_DELETE as parameter of the function zebra_send_sr_policy all defined in zclient.[hc].

If the first segment of the policy is an unknown label, it is kept until notified by the mpls hooks zebra_mpls_label_created, and then it is installed.

To get notified when a policy status changes, a client can implement the sr_policy_notify_status callback defined in zclient.[hc].

For encoding/decoding the various data structures used to comunicate with zebra, the following functions are available from zclient.[hc]: zapi_sr_policy_encode, zapi_sr_policy_decode and zapi_sr_policy_notify_status_decode.

Pathd

The pathd daemon manages all the possible candidate paths for the segment routing policies and selects the best one following the segment routing policy draft. It also supports loadable modules for handling dynamic candidate paths and the creation of new policies and candidate paths at runtime.

The responsibilities of the pathd base daemon, not including any optional modules, are:

  • Store the policies and all the possible candidate paths for them.

  • Select the best candidate path for each policy and send it to Zebra.

  • Provide VTYSH configuration to set up policies and candidate paths.

  • Provide a Northbound API to manipulate configured policies and candidate paths.

  • Handle loadable modules for extending the functionality.

  • Provide an API to the loadable module to manipulate policies and candidate paths.

Threading Model

The daemon runs completely inside the main thread using FRR event model, there is no threading involved.

Source Code

Internal Data Structures

The main data structures for policies and candidate paths are defined in pathd.h and implemented in pathd.c.

When modifying these structures, either directly or through the functions exported by pathd.h, nothing should be deleted/freed right away. The deletion or modification flags must be set and when all the changes are done, the function srte_apply_changes must be called. When called, a new candidate path may be elected and sent to Zebra, and all the structures flagged as deleted will be freed. In addition, a hook will be called so dynamic modules can perform any required action when the elected candidate path changes.

Northbound API

The northbound API is defined in path_nb.[ch] and implemented in path_nb_config.c for configuration data and path_nb_state.c for operational data.

Command Line Client

The command-line client (VTYSH) is implemented in path_cli.c.

Interface with Zebra

All the functions interfacing with Zebra are defined and implemented in path_zebra.[hc].

Loadable Module API

For the time being, the API the loadable module uses is defined by pathd.h, but in the future, it should be moved to a dedicated include file.