libxBGP

libxBGP.a

About

Library containing a set of helpers to primarily pluginize a routing network protocol implementation written in C.

libxBGP.a is not meant to only work with network protocols, but with any other program written in C (e.g. Apache, SSHFS, etc.). In fact, all C programs can be concerned.

Building

We rely on several repositories to build libxBGP. A global architecture is depicted on the above picture

$ git clone https://github.com/pluginized-protocols/libxbgp.git libxbgp
$ cd libxbgp
$ git submodule update --init --recursive
# Patch michelfralloc to avoid warnings
$ patch -p0 < Make_dev_zero_fd_extern_in_header.patch

The library you will build is relying on some other dependencies you need to download before linking libubpf.a inside a protocol implementation :

• cmake
• json-c 0.12
• CUnit 2.1.3 (to test your build of libxbgp.a)
• C compiler supporting gnu11 standard
• POSIX thread and XSI extensions
• libmath (-lm)
• libffi

The compilation has been successful with GCC9 and glibc 2.30.

We use cmake in order to build libxBGP. Just follow these simple commands to build your version of libxbgp.a:

$ cd libxbgp
$ mkdir build
$ cd build && cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..
$ make

### run tests ###
$ make test

Documentation

TO BE UPDATED. THE DOCUMENTATION IS OBSOLETE AND DOES NOT REFLECT HOW TO INTERRACT WITH LIBXBGP ANYMORE !

Everything is on the docs folder. The documentation is written with sphinx and sphinx_rtd_theme. Hence, to be able to build the documentation, it is needed to first install python-sphinx either via your package manager or via pip.

When sphinx has been successfully installed, install the theme according your Python version. Again, it can be done via pip, by executing pip install sphinx-rtd-theme or via your package manager (python-sphinx_rtd_theme).

When the requirements are satisfied, the below commands build the documentation to be accessed via a web browser:

$ cd docs
$ make html

The output are stored at ./ubpf_tools/docs/build/html. The file index.html is the root html document.

If you want to build the documentation in another format such as pdf, simply change the output target when building with make (e.g. make latexpdf). However, the html version of the doc is the only one supported and tested at the time of writing.

Linking

This library is meant to be linked into the protocol to be pluginized. The building steps will create a static library (libxbgp.a). Public headers that communicate with the virtual machine are stored in ./libxbgp/include.

Two compatible BGP implementations using libxbgp can be found on xbgp_frr and xbgp_bird.