XORP is an

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

Internet Protocol The Internet Protocol (IP) is the network layer communications protocol in the Internet protocol suite for relaying datagrams across network boundaries. Its routing function enables internetworking, and essentially establishes the Internet. ...

routing Routing is the process of selecting a path for traffic in a network or between or across multiple networks. Broadly, routing is performed in many types of networks, including circuit-switched networks, such as the public switched telephone netw ...

software suite originally designed at the

International Computer Science Institute The International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) is an independent, non-profit research organization located in Berkeley, California, United States. Since its founding in 1988, ICSI has maintained an affiliation agreement with the University ...

in Berkeley, California. The name is derived from ''eXtensible Open Router Platform''. It supports OSPF, BGP, RIP, PIM, IGMP, OLSR. The product is designed from principles of software modularity and extensibility and aims at exhibiting stability and providing feature requirements for production use while also supporting networking research. The development project was founded by

Mark Handley Mark Handley is a playwright and screenwriter. In 1977, he and his wife moved to the Pacific Northwest where they lived in isolation in a log cabin that they built themselves. He is best known for his play '' Idioglossia'', which was later pro ...

in 2000. Receiving funding from

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the devel ...

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, and the

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, it released its first production software in July 2004. The project was then run by Atanu Ghosh of the

, in

Berkeley, California Berkeley ( ) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland and Emer ...

. In July 2008, the

transferred the XORP technology to a new entity, XORP Inc., a commercial startup founded by the leaders of the opensource project team and backed by Onset Ventures and

Highland Capital Partners Highland Capital Partners is a global venture capital firm with offices in Boston, Silicon Valley, and San Francisco. Highland has raised over $4 billion in committed capital and invested in more than 280 companies, with 47 IPOs and 134 Acquisi ...

. In February 2010, XORP Inc. was wound up, a victim of the recession. However the open source project continued, with the servers based at

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. In March 2011, Ben Greear became the project maintainer and the www.xorp.org server is now hosted by Candela Technologies. The XORP codebase consists of around 670,000 lines of C++ and is developed primarily on

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...

, but supported on

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. Support for XORP on Microsoft Windows was recently re-added to the development tree. XORP is available for download as a

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or as source code via the project's homepage. The software suite was selected commercially as the routing platform for the

Vyatta Vyatta is a software-based virtual router, virtual firewall and VPN products for Internet Protocol networks (IPv4 and IPv6). A free download of Vyatta has been available since March 2006. The system is a specialized Debian-based Linux distribut ...

line of products in its early releases, but later has been replaced with

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Routing features

As of 2009, the project supports the following routing protocols: *Static routing *

Routing Information Protocol The Routing Information Protocol (RIP) is one of the oldest distance-vector routing protocols which employs the hop count as a routing metric. RIP prevents routing loops by implementing a limit on the number of hops allowed in a path from so ...

(RIP and RIPng): ** (RIP version 2) ** (RIP-2 MD5 Authentication) ** (RIPng for IPv6) *

Border Gateway Protocol Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is a standardized exterior gateway protocol designed to exchange routing and reachability information among autonomous systems (AS) on the Internet. BGP is classified as a path-vector routing protocol, and it mak ...

: ** (A Border Gateway Protocol 4 (BGP-4)) ** (Capabilities Advertisement with BGP-4) ** (Multiprotocol Extensions for BGP-4) ** (Use of BGP-4 Multiprotocol Extensions for IPv6 Inter-Domain Routing) ** (BGP Communities Attribute) ** (BGP Route Reflection - An Alternative to Full Mesh IBGP) ** (Autonomous System Confederations for BGP) ** (BGP Route Flap Damping) ** (BGP Support for Four-octet AS Number Space) ** (Definitions of Managed Objects for the Fourth Version of the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP-4) using SMIv2) *

Open Shortest Path First Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) is a routing protocol for Internet Protocol (IP) networks. It uses a link state routing (LSR) algorithm and falls into the group of interior gateway protocols (IGPs), operating within a single autonomous syste ...

version 2 (OSPFv2) and version 3 (OSPFv3): ** (OSPF Version 2) ** (The OSPF Not-So-Stubby Area (NSSA) Option) ** (OSPF for IPv6) * PIM Sparse Mode (PIM-SM): ** ** *

IGMP The Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) is a communications protocol used by hosts and adjacent routers on IPv4 networks to establish multicast group memberships. IGMP is an integral part of IP multicast and allows the network to direct m ...

v1, v2, and v3: ** (Internet Group Management Protocol, Version 2) ** (Internet Group Management Protocol, Version 3) *

Multicast Listener Discovery Multicast Listener Discovery (MLD) is a component of the Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) suite. MLD is used by IPv6 routers for discovering multicast listeners on a directly attached link, much like Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) ...

(MLD v1 and v2): ** (Multicast Listener Discovery (MLD) for IPv6) ** (Multicast Listener Discovery Version 2 (MLDv2) for IPv6) * Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP v2): **

User interface

XORP provides a command line interface for interactive configuration and operation monitoring. The interface is implemented as a distinct application called ''xorpsh'', that may be invoked by multiple users simultaneously. It interacts via

interprocess communication In computer science, inter-process communication or interprocess communication (IPC) refers specifically to the mechanisms an operating system provides to allow the processes to manage shared data. Typically, applications can use IPC, categoriz ...

with the router core modules. The command line language is modelled after that of

Juniper Networks Juniper Networks, Inc. is an American multinational corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. The company develops and markets networking products, including routers, switches, network management software, network security products, ...

JunOS Junos OS (also known as Juniper Junos, Junos and JUNOS) is a FreeBSD-based network operating system used in Juniper Networks routing, switching and security devices. Versioning Junos OS was first made available on 7 July 1998, with new featur ...

platform.

References

External links

Official website

SourceForge website

Release Notes

Slashdot discussion
{{Routing software Free routing software

Routing features

User interface

See also

References

External links