Open-Mesh

On October 16th, B.A.T.M.A.N. team has released batman-adv 2013.4.0, the newest in a series of stability and bugfix releases. The recently introduced data distribution daemon 'alfred' received quite some attention and gained new features. As the kernel module always depends on the Linux kernel it was compiled against, it does not make sense to provide binaries on our website. As usual, you will find the signed tarballs in our download section:

https://downloads.open-mesh.org/batman/releases/batman-adv-2013.4.0/

as well as prepackaged binaries in your distribution.

Thanks¶

Thanks to all people sending in patches:

• Andrew Lunn <andrew@lunn.ch>
• Antonio Quartulli <ordex@autistici.org>
• Linus Lüssing <linus.luessing@web.de>
• Marco Dalla Torre <marco.dallato@gmail.com>
• Marek Lindner <mareklindner@neomailbox.ch>
• Matthias Schiffer <mschiffer@universe-factory.net>
• Simon Wunderlich <sw@simonwunderlich.de>
• Sven Eckelmann <sven@open-mesh.com>
• Wedson Almeida Filho <wedsonaf@gmail.com>

and to all those that supported us with good advice or rigorous testing:

• Braden Aran <bradenaran@gmail.com>

batman-adv¶

With this release comes a fix for a kernel crash running on hardware with specific Ethernet chips triggering a rare code path when forwarding traffic. A fix for the network coding initialization was submitted to allow to create multiple batX interfaces when this feature has been included in the module. The bridge loop avoidance now correctly handles VLAN tags (a regression introduced with the previous release). Additional Linux kernel backward compatibility code enables batman-adv to run on various kernel versions.

batctl¶

The incorrectly reported TCP payload length in the tcpdump component was fixed. The hyphens in the manpage were properly escaped to be groff compliant. C types and error handling were improved to better handle some error cases.

alfred¶

In order to allow a mesh topology visualization with true geographic layout alfred was enriched with a location service based on libgpsd. In addition to retrieving the location via GPS on mobile nodes alfred can be configured with a static location on stationary nodes to be announced in the network.
A new JSON output format for the vis service was added. The newly added format is JSON compliant throughout an entire message, in contrast to the "legacy" per-line JSON output. Alfred also learned to be tolerant to vanishing/reappearing interfaces and to switch its operation mode (secondary/primary) without the need for a restart or losing cached information. To avoid conflicts in distributions with other "vis" binaries (like the batmand vis), the binary was renamed to "batadv-vis". Manpages have been added to help documenting the growing functionality. Also various code/build system cleanups and bugfixes have been integrated.

Happy routing,

The B.A.T.M.A.N. team