← Projects

ZAPI Versioning Protobuf

Add a supportable versioning system to ZAPI and convert to protobuf

---

Details

350hrs project - Hard Difficulty

In FRR, our routing daemons run as separate processes that communicate to Zebra via sockets. We use an internal stream protocol called ZAPI to accomplish this documented here. The code for it is largely found in lib/zclient.h and zebra/zapi_msg.c. There is some pseudo-versioning done with it but nothing that we support users to make use of in their own out-of-tree code. The protocol is currently supported insofar that we assume only daemons in our code tree will use it.

For this project, you will research/design a versioned API we can support long term in our daemons. Along with this, you will also convert our encoding to use protobuf. This API and protocol should also provide a way for us to logically extend it to support other programmatic interaction with Zebra (ex: general routing database to provide route dumps). The API should be well documented on the docs page so people can easily use it.

These changes will need to be heavily tested (unit and integration) across our daemons to ensure existing functionality is not broken as it touches all of them.

Quick Start

• Review our current ZAPI docs
• Familiarize yourself with ZAPI in lib/zclient.c, zebra/zapi_msg.c, and zebra/zserv.c
• Read up on protobuf

Mentors

Stephen Worley (@sworleys)
Quentin Young (@qlyoung)

Helpful Links

FRR dev guide
FRR user guide