Open-Mesh

The B.A.T.M.A.N. team hereby announces the release of the first bugfix milestone for the batman-adv 0.2 branch which focuses on stability but also brings improvements and small changes.
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-0.2.1/

as well as prepackaged binaries in your distribution.

Important changes¶

The batman-adv logging facilities underwent structural changes to fully integrate into the standard Linux logging mechanisms. Please study the README to get further details on how to access the debug logs. In addition, the "vis" /proc file has been split up into two files: vis_server and vis_data. The vis_server controls the vis server status whereas the vis_data file exports the visualization "raw"
data which can be easily parsed by user space tools. Again, details can be found in our documentation.

Thanks¶

Special thanks go to:

• Andrew Lunn for going through the entire code base to refactor the code and adjust the coding style to match standard Linux coding style guidelines
• Linus Luessing for his restless testing in so many scenarios and sending a lot of patches and suggestions.

Thanks to all people sending in patches:

• Andrew Lunn <andrew@lunn.ch>
• Julia Lawall <julia@diku.dk>
• Linus Luessing <linus.luessing@web.de>
• Marek Lindner <lindner_marek@yahoo.de>
• Simon Wunderlich <siwu@hrz.tu-chemnitz.de>
• Sven Eckelmann <sven.eckelmann@gmx.de>
• Sven-Thorsten Dietrich <sdietrich@novell.com>

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

• Kevin Steen <batman@kevinsteen.net>

batman-adv¶

Albeit being a bugfix release we dared to include some bigger changes because we felt their gain outweighs the risk. For instance, we replaced the packet handling thread which was responsible for routing the payload data through the mesh by an advanced skbuff handling technique. Now, packets are received directly by registering the Ethernet type and handling skbs instead of
self-allocated buffers which boosts the performance considerably and reduces latency.

On the other hand batman-adv is moving towards full Linux kernel integration which requires some significant changes under the hood as well as on the surface. Batman's own logging facility has been removed (the standard Linux logging is used instead). The vis output comes now in a neutral format, easily parsable by user space applications. Since the module entered the official Linux realm several
people threw static code analyzers (e.g. Coccinelle, sparse) onto the code to find bugs. Some (possible) memory leaks, optimizations and a false alarms have been found and dealt with. Many more bugs, race conditions and crashes have been fixed. Now, it also is possible to change the MAC address on bat0.

batctl¶

Since the vis output format has changed, batctl received a parser for the neutral format to convert the output into either dot draw or JSON. If you wish to write your own parser, please see our documentation and/or the batctl code as an example. The batman-adv debug log will show up in the standard kernel logs of your system, hence to access the logs "batctl log" is not needed any longer. Please use the tools provided by your distribution (dmesg/logread/syslog/etc). However, "batctl log" remains available and can be used to filter existing logfiles for batman-adv output
and to replace the mac addresses by bat-host names.

Happy routing,

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