Project

General

Profile

Batman-adv 0.2 released

Added by Marek Lindner about 15 years ago

The B.A.T.M.A.N. team is pleased to announce the availability of the second batman-adv release which brings major improvements, new features, changes along the way and a series of bugfixes. As the kernel module always depends on the kernel it was compiled against it does not make sense to provide binaries. However, you will find signed source tarballs for the module and batctl:

https://downloads.open-mesh.org/batman/stable/sources/

Important changes

With this release we believe that the kernel module is fully capable to replace a routing daemon feature wise as well stability wise. Therefore the batman-adv user space daemon (which was marked deprecated since the last release) as well as the vis-adv daemon have been removed from our repositories as they are no longer supported. We urge all remaining users to consider a migration towards the the kernel module.

Thanks

Special thanks go to:

  • Sven Eckelmann who continuously provides us with patches and advice whenever problems show up
  • Andrew Lunn & Yang Su for their analysis of the routing protocol which helped us to identify temporary routing loops in the code
  • Linus Luessing & Freifunk Luebeck for the rigorous testing & bug reporting of all (im)possible race conditions they encountered
  • Jacob Marble who tried to find a new home for our extravagant mailing list requirements and gave birth to the batctl idea

Thanks to all people sending in patches (in no particular order):

batman-adv

The module has undergone some major changes to better fit into the event based nature of the kernel. We removed a number of timers (e.g the new interface detection) which also greatly reduces the risk of race conditions. Also new is the packet queue that allowed implementing the aggregation (already known from the user space implementation) as well as transmission retry (ARQ) for payload broadcasts because we noticed most broadcasts vanish in transit. This feature merits some extra attention as it is the first in which the routing module influences the payload traffic directly to enhance the mesh experience. We also spent quite some energy to fix bugs in the routing algorithm that triggered temporary routing loops, squashed a TTL code bug and removed the ghost entries
from the originator table. The whole code received linux coding style adjustments, refactoring & cleanups. Furthermore all kernel version compatibility code has been unified in compat.h. The internal vis server received another output format (JSON) plus secondary interface export functionality in the dot draw format. Numerous small bugs were fixed such as using the random ethernet generator from the kernel for better randomness, exporting the version via /sys/module/batman_adv/version, fixing alignment issues, race conditions and deadlocks.

batctl

Although this is the first release of batctl it carries the same release version as the kernel module (for the sake of simplicity). It is based on the work of Andreas Langer who created the battools which were never officially released. Since then it has been extended to the point that it serves as configuration utility, monitoring and debugging application. It allows to modify the module parameters, reading the logfiles & tables, decapsulate embedded packets on the fly, traceroute to / ping mac addresses, generate sequence number graphs and more. Check the README to get an impression.

road ahead

The batman-adv development lying ahead can be separated into 2 big chunks: The linux kernel integration already started and we began working on batman's move into the linux land (more information can be found on www.open-mesh.org) - expect follow up news in the coming weeks. In the meantime a large number of ideas are flying around how to further improve the B.A.T.M.A.N. algorithm to increase its convergence speed, reduce traffic overhead and much more. A first idea collection will be published soon.

Happy routing,

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


Comments