mstpd: Multiple Spanning Tree Protocol Daemon

MSTPD is an open source user-space daemon licensed under GPLv2.

MSTPD is reported to be compliant with IXIA ANVL RSTP test suite, with the notable exception of looped-back BPDUs (see discussion on the matter on the Implementation Features wiki page: https://github.com/mstpd/mstpd/wiki/ImplementationFeatures).

Important note! MSTP part of the code (as opposed to STP/RSTP part) is mainly untested, so I believe it will behave unexpectedly in many situations. Don't use it in production!

Official repository: https://github.com/mstpd/mstpd

IRC: Feel free to join and chat with us on #mstpd @ freenode!

Implementation Features

See the wiki page: https://github.com/mstpd/mstpd/wiki/ImplementationFeatures

Also MSTPD includes a number of useful features which are not defined in 802.1Q-2005 standard, but are found on many commercial switches. Namely:

• BPDU Guard. Added by Satish Ashok.

• Bridge Assurance. Added by Satish Ashok. (WARNING: it might be dropped in the future and replaced by the AutoIsolate feature of 802.1Q-2011)

• Enhanced statistics: TX/RX BPDU/TCN counters, Forwarding/Blocking transitions counters, last 2 ports which caused topology change. Added by Satish Ashok.

Goals of the project

• Create reliable and well-tested MSTP code.

• Get some user base - the more users of this code, the more test coverage is.

• Replace rstpd.

Current state

The daemon depends on the bridge Linux kernel code to gather basic info about bridge, such as bridge state (up/down, STP on/off), slave interfaces for the bridge and their state (up/down). Also daemon translates CIST states to the kernel bridge slaves, so mstpd in (r)stp mode can be used as replacement for the current rstpd (and even for the in-kernel stp!).

MSTP standard (802.1Q-2005) requires from the bridge to be heavily interconnected with the VLANs infrastructure, namely:

• Support several (2 .. 65) independent FIDs (Forwarding Information Databases). Each VLAN belongs to the one of FIDs, and learning of the MAC addresses is done independently in the each FID (independent learning as opposed to shared learning in the current Linux bridges);

• Support several (2 .. 65) Multiple Spanning Tree Instances. Each FID belongs to the one of MSTIs;

• Support per-MSTI port states (Discarding / Learning / Forwarding) so that each bridge port can have different states for different MSTIs.

This is a big flaw in Linux. Actually, in Linux bridge code is totally independent from VLAN code and given wide deployment of the 802.1Q-2005 compatible bridges this is wrong approach. Bridge and VLAN code should be merged together.

Anyway, this is not true for now, so MSTP daemon is not as useful for the bare Linux box (except for the (R)STP case - as stated above it works with the kernel bridge well enough in this case). But there are plenty embedded cases where bridging functions are implemented by specialized hardware with support of custom drivers. For such cases MSTP daemon can be successfully utilized. The daemon code has a few hooks where driver-specific code should be inserted to control the bridge hardware.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Initial code was written by looking at (and shamelessly stealing some parts from):

• rstpd by Srinivas Aji <Aji_Srinivas ? emc DOT com>

• rstplib by Alex Rozin <alexr ? nbase DOT co DOT il> and Michael Rozhavsky <mike ? nbase DOT co DOT il>