[j-nsp] 10.3 on MX960 with MPC only?

[Richard A Steenbergen]

On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 08:01:50AM -0700, Derick Winkworth wrote:
> In fact, yes!  10.3 is primarily a JUNOS cleanup effort.  There should 
> be close to nothing in the release notes compared to previous 
> releases.
> 
> I believe they intend to do this with another release in the near 
> future.  Like 10.5?

The story I've heard is that they put the brakes on almost all new 
feature development for 10.3 and I think 10.4, to give them a chance to 
get their systest act together. I'm not sure if halting feature 
development (and switching to a goofy quarterly date-based release 
system :P) is really the right way to fix things, but at least they're 
trying to do something to address the very serious issue of the 
disasterously buggy code they've been churning out lately, so at least 
that's something. :)

> I think they are really, really wanting to have another golden release 
> similar to 8.5.  Perhaps Richard's stalled route issue will be 
> cleared?

Don't get your hopes up, I don't think there has been any significant 
progress made on the route stall issue. As far as I can tell it appears 
to be a long-standing issue in rpd that Juniper just doesn't have the 
ability or will to fix (at least not at the rate they're losing rpd 
developers).

The root of the issue seems to be that exchanging large numbers of 
routes over BGP will starve something within rpd, to the point that new 
routes cannot be installed to the FIB, and in some cases the box won't 
even start advertising any routes outbound,  while it is still receiving 
new BGP routes. For MX's our best solution was to roll out a layer of 
dedicated route reflector boxes to replace our current IBGP core mesh, 
thus hiding most of the inactive paths from the real routers (e.g. 
bringing it down from 3-4 million paths over ~30 sessions to 330k * 2 
paths from 2 sessions). EX is still pretty bad though, you can stall it 
for 20 minutes with less than a million paths, which is a real problem 
when you have a customer aggregation router which won't advertise 
customer prefixes for 20 minutes following rpd restart.

I'm really wondering how things are coming with SMP-capable JUNOS. I 
tried booting a jinstall64 olive, and while the image isindeed using an 
amd64 kernel it STILL doesn't have SMP enabled. Considering they briefly 
slipped in a line about upcoming Core2 Duo/Quad RE's into some recent 
release notes, I really hope they're gonna have this working soon. :)

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)