Manage default route(s) explicitly

RFE: https://launchpad.net/bugs/1921126

This spec proposes to allow explicit management of the default route(s) of a Neutron router. This is mostly useful for a user to install multiple default routes for Equal Cost Multipath (ECMP) and treat all these routes uniformly.

Problem Description

Today the extraroute API allows explicit addition of default route(s), where by default route we mean a route with destination=0.0.0.0/0 and an arbitrary (connected) nexthop. But the router already has an implicit default route derived from its external gateway settings (with its nexthop being the gateway port’s first subnet’s gateway_ip). To the best of my knowledge the interaction of the default routes out of these two sources is problematic. For example our api-ref has warnings about it [1]. Other times people not familiar with these warnings consider this behavior outright buggy [2].

We also already have a spec merged for ECMP [3]. ECMP makes as much sense for the default route as for any other route. But today if you want to manage multiple default route entries in order to have ECMP over the default route, then you have to manage a mishmash of the implicit default route and some other default routes via the extraroute API.

Proposed Change

This spec proposes to separate the implicit management of a router’s default route from the explicit. A router either has the one traditional implicit default route or all of its default route(s) are explicitly managed via the extraroute API. But never a mixture of these two.

We propose to have a new API extension: default-route-management. Which introduces a new router attribute: explicit_default_routes. Which is a boolean and defaults to False. It can be set at router create and update.

When explicit_default_routes is set to False (implicit mode) the default route of a router is derived from its external gateway as before. This default route is not visible through the extraroute API (again as before). For the sake of backward compatibility we should not reject default routes on the extraroute API. However we could document that in implicit mode managing default routes over the extraroute API is not recommended.

Updating a router’s explicit_default_routes (in both directions) is rejected except when a router’s routes attribute contains:

  • either no default routes,

  • or exactly one default route with the same nexthop as in implicit mode.

When explicit_default_routes is set to True (explicit mode) the Neutron router is not going to have any default routes installed implicitly. However a router can be updated from implicit to explicit mode without traffic loss if the one extra route allowed above (that is: exactly one default route with the same nexthop as in implicit mode) is present before switching to explicit mode. In this case the default route is preserved through the update.

In explicit mode default routes can be managed via the extraroute API. And they can be managed properly - for example all of the default routes set are visible via the extraroute API.

DB Impact

Extend the routers table with boolean column explicit_default_routes defaulting to False.

REST API Impact

New API extension: default-route-management introducing new router attribute: explicit_default_routes.

Client Impact

Relevant changes in osc and openstacksdk.

Testing

  • Unit tests.

  • Tempest tests in neutron-tempest-plugin.

Assignee(s)

References