[B.A.T.M.A.N.] batman-adv 2012.1.0 released

[B.A.T.M.A.N.] batman-adv 2012.1.0 released

[Marek Lindner]

The B.A.T.M.A.N. team is delighted to announce its newest release, 2012.1.0, 
bringing mainly bug fixes and code cleanups. Also part of the release is a 
newly developed routing algorithm framework which allows switching between 
different routing algorithms. As the kernel module always depends on the Linux 
kernel it was compiled against, it does not make sense to provide binaries on 
our website. As usual, you will find the signed tarballs in our download 
section:

http://downloads.open-mesh.org/batman/releases/batman-adv-2012.1.0/

as well as prepackaged binaries in your distribution.


Thanks
------

Thanks to all people sending in patches:

 * Alexey Fisher <bug-track@fisher-privat.net>
 * Antonio Quartulli <ordex@autistici.org>
 * Danny Kukawka <danny.kukawka@bisect.de>
 * Marek Lindner <lindner_marek@yahoo.de>
 * Martin Hundebøll <martin@hundeboll.net>
 * Simon Wunderlich <siwu@hrz.tu-chemnitz.de>
 * Sven Eckelmann <sven@narfation.org>


batman-adv
----------

Most changes coming with this release happened under the hood to either 
improve stability or pave the way for new features, most notably the routing 
algorithm abstraction. Over the last months several ideas centering around the 
question how to improve the current routing algorithm have surfaced. To better 
experiment with these ideas while keeping a working system for our users the 
routing algorithm abstraction was added. It allows to easily develop and test 
new routing concepts while taking advantage of the existing batman-adv 
features and infrastructure. The API will be further refined with the next 
releases to enable alternative algorithms to be included as well.
The translation table code received further attention which led to the 
discovery of endless loops in the tt-request mechanism (under certain 
circumstances). This was addressed along with a TT_CLIENT_NEW flag race 
condition when a new client was added to the internal hash. All batman-adv 
internal timeouts have been converted to milliseconds for consistency 
purposes. Even the batman-adv makefile was modernized to provide an install 
target and a selection system for conveniently compiling features into the 
module. 


batctl
------

Each batman-adv (layer 2) ICMP packet used to ping or traceroute a node comes 
with a sequence number to detect failures. Prior to this release batctl 
ping/traceroute did not compare the outgoing sequence number with the incoming 
sequence number to verify whether they indeed match. In WiFi environments 
exhibiting high packet loss and excessive packet retransmissions this missing 
check led to false results.
Furthermore, the return code of batctl ping was improved to properly indicate 
a failure.


Happy routing, 
The B.A.T.M.A.N. team