status

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

Ze is in early active development. It is not released and should not be used in production. APIs, configuration syntax, and plugin interfaces may change without notice. That said, anyone coming from ExaBGP who understands the risks may already find Ze useful for specific use cases, particularly route injection, BGP monitoring, and wire-level protocol tooling.

This page is the honest ledger. If a feature is listed here as working, it has tests behind it. If a feature is missing, it is missing.

What works

BGP protocol

Ze establishes BGP sessions, exchanges routes, and handles the full RFC 4271 FSM lifecycle. The wire layer encodes and decodes across every listed address family.

Area	Status
Session establishment (FSM)	Working. Tested against real peers and built-in test peers.
OPEN capability negotiation	Working. ASN4, ADD-PATH, Extended Messages, Extended Next-Hop, Graceful Restart, Route Refresh, Role, Hostname, Software Version.
UPDATE encode/decode	Working. Every address family decodes. Most encode.
NOTIFICATION handling	Working. All standard codes including the RFC 9003 shutdown communication.
Keepalive and hold timer	Working.
TCP MD5 authentication	Working on Linux and FreeBSD. Not available on macOS (kernel limitation).

Address families

All families decode. Most encode. Run ze --plugins to see the current state on your build.

Family	Decode	Encode	Config routes
IPv4 / IPv6 unicast	Yes	Yes	Yes
IPv4 / IPv6 multicast	Yes	Yes	Yes
VPNv4 / VPNv6	Yes	Yes	Yes
EVPN	Yes	Yes	Yes
FlowSpec (IPv4, IPv6, VPN)	Yes	Yes	Yes
Labeled unicast	Yes	Yes	Yes
BGP-LS	Yes	No	No
VPLS	Yes	Yes	Yes
MVPN	Yes	No	No
Route Target Constraint	Yes	No	No
Mobile User Plane	Yes	Yes	Yes

Plugins

32 plugins ship in-tree. The plugin lifecycle (five-stage handshake, typed IPC, event dispatch) is usable for new plugins, with the caveat that the RPC names and payloads are not stable.

Plugin	Status
bgp-rib (route storage, best-path)	Working
bgp-rs (route server, forward-all with zero-copy)	Working
bgp-gr (RFC 4724 graceful restart)	Working
bgp-rpki (RTR client, origin validation, fail-open)	Working
bgp-adj-rib-in (raw hex replay)	Working
bgp-route-refresh (RFC 2918 and 7313)	Working
bgp-role (RFC 9234, OTC filtering)	Working
bgp-hostname, bgp-softver	Working
bgp-llnh (link-local next hop)	Working
bgp-persist (across restarts)	Working
bgp-watchdog (deferred announcement)	Working
All nine NLRI plugins	Working, decode and encode

Infrastructure

Area	Status
YANG configuration and validation	Working. Unknown keys rejected with suggestions.
Interactive config editor	Working. Tab completion, rollback, live validation.
Config reload (SIGHUP)	Working. Add, remove, or update peers without a restart.
SSH-based CLI	Working. Interactive and single-command modes.
Hierarchical logging	Working. Per-subsystem levels, runtime changes.
ExaBGP config migration	Working. Auto-detect and convert.
ExaBGP plugin bridge	Partial. 20 of 37 compatibility tests pass.
Chaos testing (ze-chaos)	Working. Deterministic replay, property validation.

Test suite

Type	Count
Unit test functions	~8,000
Functional test files (.ci)	559
Fuzz targets	41
Linters	28

Tests run with the race detector enabled.

What does not work

Not implemented

Feature	Notes
FIB and kernel integration	Ze does not program system routes via the built-in BGP engine today. A fib-kernel plugin exists for programming the Linux FIB for interface-managed routes, but full BGP-to-FIB installation is not production quality. For now, treat Ze as a control-plane daemon like ExaBGP.
BFD	Not implemented. NOTIFICATION subcode 10 is parsed but BFD sessions are not managed.
BMP (RFC 7854)	Not implemented. No route collection export.
MRT dump (RFC 6396)	Not implemented for writing. Reading works for analysis.
Confederation (RFC 5065)	Not implemented. IETF draft-ietf-idr-deprecate-as-set-confed-set deprecates the AS_CONFED_SET segment type.
ASPA verification	Not implemented. RPKI origin validation only.
Dynamic neighbors	Every peer must be explicitly configured.
Private AS removal	Not implemented.
AIGP	Plugin exists as a capability. The metric is not consumed in best-path selection.
Flowspec redirect to VRF with 4-byte ASN	Extended community type 0x82 encoding is implemented but decoding is not yet complete.
gRPC API	Not implemented. Ze uses a custom text command protocol over Unix sockets, plus a REST API.
Auto plugin discovery	Plugins must be declared in the config.
Multi-instance	One daemon per config file.

Known rough edges

Area	Issue
ExaBGP compatibility	17 of 37 compat tests fail. The gaps are in wire encoding for specific attribute combinations.
TTL security	Parsed from config but not wired to the socket options.
macOS TCP MD5	Returns "not supported" because the Darwin kernel lacks it.
Error messages	Some parse errors could point more precisely at the offending input.
Packaging	No Docker image, no binary releases, no OS packages. Build from source.

API stability

Nothing is stable. The configuration syntax, the JSON event format, the plugin IPC protocol, the CLI command names and output format, and the Go package APIs can all change without notice. Do not import Ze as a library.

Should you use Ze today

If you are coming from ExaBGP and want to try the migration story, file issues: the feedback is genuinely useful. If you need a production BGP daemon, use BIRD, FRR, or OpenBGPd. The Why Ze page has a fuller discussion of the trade-offs.

If you do use Ze, pin to a commit (there are no releases), run make ze-verify before deploying any build, start with monitoring rather than route injection, keep ExaBGP as a fallback, and file issues for anything that bites you.

See also

• What is Ze.
• Architecture.
• Comparison against other BGP daemons.

Adapted from main/docs/guide/status.md and main/docs/features.md.