feature inventory

Pre-Alpha. This page describes behavior that may change.

The full inventory of what Ze does. Not the narrative ("why this exists") or the comparison ("how it stacks up"), just the list. Use this page when you need to check whether a specific feature is present and whether it is built into the engine or provided by a plugin.

The in-tree docs/features.md is the canonical source. When this page and that one disagree, the in-tree page wins.

BGP protocol

See BGP peers for the configuration surface and the comparison page for the per-feature breakdown against other daemons.

Area	Detail
Address families	21, covering IPv4/IPv6 unicast, multicast, labelled unicast, VPN, FlowSpec, EVPN, VPLS, BGP-LS, MVPN, RTC, and MUP. IPv4/IPv6 unicast and multicast are built into the engine; everything else ships as an nlri plugin.
Capabilities	Multiprotocol, 4-byte ASN, Route Refresh, Enhanced Route Refresh, ADD-PATH, Extended Messages, Extended Next Hop, Graceful Restart, Long-Lived GR, BGP Role, Hostname, Software Version, Link-Local Next Hop.
Path attributes	ORIGIN, AS_PATH, NEXT_HOP, MED, LOCAL_PREF, ATOMIC_AGGREGATE, AGGREGATOR, COMMUNITY, ORIGINATOR_ID, CLUSTER_LIST, MP_REACH_NLRI, MP_UNREACH_NLRI, EXTENDED_COMMUNITY, LARGE_COMMUNITY, PREFIX_SID.
Route loop detection	AS loop (RFC 4271 section 9), ORIGINATOR_ID (RFC 4456), CLUSTER_LIST (RFC 4456). All three run before prefix-limit counting and silently treat the route as withdrawn.

Configuration

Feature	Detail
YANG-modelled	Every field, every CLI prompt, every web UI form comes from the same YANG schemas.
Atomic commit	Edit, diff, commit, rollback, commit confirmed with auto-rollback.
Per-user drafts	Each user gets an independent editor session; drafts survive disconnection.
Hot reload	No daemon restart required for config changes. Session resets only when the underlying change demands it.
Prefix limits (RFC 4486)	Mandatory per-family per-peer maximum. Refuses to start without one.
Update groups	Automatic cross-peer UPDATE building deduplication, based on encoding context.
Session resilience	TCP_NODELAY, DSCP CS6, graceful close, Send Hold Timer (RFC 9687), congestion extension for hold timer, bounded overflow pool with GR-aware teardown.

Interface management

iface plugin. Netlink on Linux, stdlib fallback elsewhere.

Interface type	MAC required	Notes
ethernet	Yes	Physical ethernet interface.
veth	Yes	Virtual ethernet pair.
bridge	Yes	Bridge interface.
dummy	No	Virtual dummy interface.
loopback	No	Container, no key.

Static addressing, DHCP client, interface monitoring, and make-before-break migration with ze interface migrate.

Operator surfaces

Surface	Transport	Auth
CLI	SSH, port 2222 by default.	User database with bcrypt passwords, ED25519 host key.
Web UI	HTTPS, port 3443 by default.	Same user database. Session cookies for browsers, Basic Auth for API clients.
Looking Glass	HTTP or HTTPS on its own configurable port (separate from the web UI).	None. Read-only by design.
MCP	HTTP on 127.0.0.1, port must be specified.	Optional bearer token.
REST API	Dedicated HTTP(S) server on port 8081 by default, /api/v1/execute, /api/v1/commands, typed config sessions, Swagger UI.	Bearer per-user or single token.
gRPC API	Dedicated server on port 50051 by default, ze.api.v1.ZeService + ze.api.v1.ZeConfigService, server reflection, built-in TLS.	Bearer metadata (same tokens as REST).

Plugins

The list of built-in plugins, grouped by category. Full reference in plugins.

Category	Plugins
Storage	bgp-rib, bgp-adj-rib-in, bgp-persist.
Policy	bgp-rs, bgp-watchdog, bgp-healthcheck, bgp-filter-community, loop, bgp-role.
Resilience	bgp-gr, bgp-route-refresh.
Validation	bgp-rpki, bgp-rpki-decorator.
Capabilities	bgp-aigp, bgp-hostname, bgp-llnh, bgp-softver.
Address families	bgp-nlri-vpn, bgp-nlri-evpn, bgp-nlri-flowspec, bgp-nlri-ls, bgp-nlri-labeled, bgp-nlri-vpls, bgp-nlri-mvpn, bgp-nlri-rtc, bgp-nlri-mup.
Infrastructure	iface, fib-kernel, fib-p4, iface-dhcp, sysrib.

Observability

Feature	Where
Prometheus metrics	telemetry { prometheus { ... } }. Peer state, message counters, prefix counters, forward-pool utilisation, connection timing histograms, plugin health.
Structured logging	JSON output, hierarchical per-subsystem levels, runtime-configurable.
Live event stream	ze cli monitor event, pipeable to `
Live peer dashboard	ze cli monitor bgp. Auto-refreshing two seconds, sortable.
Operational report bus	ze show warnings, ze show errors. Cross-subsystem state and event surface, login banner reads the same source.
MRT analysis	Standalone ze-analyse tool. Downloads from RIPE RIS and RouteViews, runs density, attribute, and community analyses.
Benchmarking	ze-perf cross-implementation latency benchmark.

Chaos testing

Feature	Detail
In-daemon chaos	--chaos-seed and --chaos-rate flags inject faults at runtime. Deterministic with a fixed seed.
Orchestrator	ze-chaos runs mock peers, validates protocol properties, and records runs to NDJSON.
Dashboard	Live HTMX web dashboard with peer table, property badges, and interactive controls.
Event logs	Record, replay, and shrink failing runs.
Properties	Convergence deadline, route consistency, no duplicate routes, hold timer enforcement, message ordering.

Developer surfaces

Feature	Detail
Self-describing	ze help --ai, ze schema list, ze env list, ze --plugins.
Plugin SDK	Go SDK for in-tree plugins, line-protocol SDK for external plugins in any language.
ExaBGP migration	ze config migrate converts configs, ze exabgp plugin runs existing scripts unchanged.
ze bgp decode / ze bgp encode	Offline BGP message codec.
Fuzz testing	Every external-input parser has a fuzz harness.
Interop testing	32 Docker-based scenarios against FRR, BIRD, and GoBGP.

Testing surface

Kind	Count or scope
Unit tests	Several thousand test functions.
Functional tests	Hundreds. Config parsing, wire encoding, plugin behaviour.
Fuzz harnesses	Every external-input parser.
Chaos scenarios	Configurable, deterministic, with event-log replay and shrinking.
Interop suite	Docker scenarios against FRR, BIRD, GoBGP.

See also

• Comparison for how these features line up against other BGP daemons.
• What is Ze for the narrative view.
• Status for what actually works today.
• In-tree features for the authoritative list.

Adapted from main/docs/features.md.