[B.A.T.M.A.N.] batman-adv 2013.3.0 released

[B.A.T.M.A.N.] batman-adv 2013.3.0 released

[Marek Lindner]

The B.A.T.M.A.N. team proudly presents its newest release - batman-adv 
2013.3.0 - a stability and bugfix release uniquely focused on ironing out bugs 
and annoyances. 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-2013.3.0/

as well as prepackaged binaries in your distribution.


Important changes
-----------------

For the first time, a batman-adv and batctl release is accompanied by 
A.L.F.R.E.D. (Almighty Lightweight Fact Remote Exchange Daemon) - a user space 
daemon conceived for the purpose of replacing the in-kernel visualization 
component with an easy to extend user space application. It bears the striking 
advantage of not only distributing visualization data but all kinds of data 
within a mesh network, thereby filling an often felt gap.

Note: The alfred vis support is not compulsory for obtaining visualization 
data as the in-kernel code still is enabled. Both systems are compatible and 
can even be deployed side by side. It is planned to remove the in-kernel code 
by the end of the year which is why it is recommended to check out alfred 
soon, in the interest of making sure the transition goes as smooth as 
possible.


Thanks
------

Thanks to all people sending in patches:

  * Antonio Quartulli <ordex@autistici.org>
  * Jiri Pirko <jiri@resnulli.us>
  * Linus Lüssing <linus.luessing@web.de>
  * Marek Lindner <lindner_marek@yahoo.de>
  * Martin Hundebøll <martin@hundeboll.net>
  * Matthias Schiffer <mschiffer@universe-factory.net>
  * Patrick McHardy <kaber@trash.net>
  * Simon Wunderlich <siwu@hrz.tu-chemnitz.de>
  * Sven Eckelmann <sven@open-mesh.com>


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

The batman-adv kernel module takes special care when transporting payload 
broadcast traffic across the mesh network to increase the likelihood of a 
successful transmission. To reduce overhead this mechanism was tweaked to only 
be enabled on wireless interfaces as it is safe to assume wired connections 
and VPNs suffer less from packet loss. The internal handling of VLAN IDs has 
been unified to prepare for the upcoming translation table VLAN support. DAT 
has learned not to reply to ARP requests sent by local clients destined for 
other local clients to avoid duplicate ARP replies. The batman-adv protocol 
(OGM) duplicate check was applied too strictly in certain situations which 
could lead to route starvation of better routes. To mitigate this effect the 
duplicate policy is applied on a per neighbor basis. Upon configuring an 
interface batman-adv would try to acquire the in-kernel network configuration 
lock or return with ERESTARTSYS in case the lock was held by some other party. 
To avoid having to abort an interface activation this part of the code was 
reworked and the need to acquire the lock removed. A crash on kernel module 
unload triggered by a double free of the traffic statistic counters was fixed. 
The network coding neighbor table won't display neighbors unsuitable for 
network coding anymore.


batctl
------

A misleading warning about an uninitialized variable when compiling with "O2" 
was fixed and a few typographic errors in the bisect output were corrected.


alfred
------

Alfred is a user space daemon for distributing arbitrary local information 
over the mesh/network in a decentralized fashion. This data can be anything 
which appears to be useful - originally designed to replace the batman-adv 
visualization (vis), you may distribute hostnames, phone books, administration 
information, DNS information, the local weather forecast, etc.
Alfred runs as daemon in the background of the system. A user may insert 
information by using the alfred binary on the command line, or use special 
programs to communicate with alfred (done via unix sockets). The daemon then 
takes care of distributing the local information to other alfred servers on 
other nodes. This is done via IPv6 link-local multicast, and does not require 
any configuration. A user can request data from alfred, and will receive the 
information available from all alfred servers in the network.


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