[B.A.T.M.A.N.] batman-adv 2011.0.0 released

[B.A.T.M.A.N.] batman-adv 2011.0.0 released

[Marek Lindner]

The B.A.T.M.A.N. team is excited to announce its latest release, 2011.0.0, 
mainly fulfilling popular feature requests but also delivering bug fixes and 
performance enhancements as well as modifications under the hood. 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-2011.0.0/
as well as prepackaged binaries in your distribution.


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

The "gateway support" coming with this release manipulates the DHCP request / 
reply behavior once activated. It is strongly suggested that you read our 
documentation before you make use of this feature to avoid surprises.


Thanks
----------------

Thanks to all people sending in patches:

 * Andreas Langer <an.langer@gmx.de>
 * Jesper Juhl <jj@chaosbits.net>
 * Linus Lüssing <linus.luessing@web.de>
 * Marek Lindner <lindner_marek@yahoo.de>
 * Simon Wunderlich <siwu@hrz.tu-chemnitz.de>
 * Sven Eckelmann <sven@narfation.org>

and to all those that supported us with good advice or rigorous testing:

 * David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
 * Russell Senior <russell@personaltelco.net>
 * Tobias Klauser <tklauser@distanz.ch>


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

This release brings the long awaited internet gateway support: Batman-adv 
nodes in a network can be declared 'gateways' with a certain bandwidth at 
their disposal. All clients learn about these gateways and can choose their 
preferred gateway based on link qualities / bandwidth. The decision is 
'propagated' to the higher layers by manipulating the DHCP requests. 
Furthermore, batman-adv implements a bridge loop detection & avoidance that 
aim to allow multiple batman-adv nodes connected to the same LAN segment 
without provoking a loop.
The initial layer2 fragmentation implementation that was included in the last 
releases was further enhanced. Batman-adv nodes forwarding other nodes' traffic 
inspect the to be transfered packets to automatically fragment the packet if 
the MTU of the outgoing interface does not allow a normal forward. Fragmented 
packets are reassembled whenever possible to keep the overhead as low as 
possible. Also new is the possibility to configure the hop penalty at runtime 
(via sysfs).

The internally used hash implementation has been reimplemented after David 
Miller pointed out major deficiencies. These changes gave the batman-adv module 
a 10% speedup when forwarding payload traffic as these operations heavily make 
use of the hash code. The Linux kernel bit operation functions replaced the 
custom functions in batman-adv which are better debugged. The cleanup of the 
sysfs code greatly reduced the code size and makes this code more manageable.


batctl
----------------

The support for the new gateway sysfs API was among the biggest changes for 
this release. It allows to easily turn the gateway mode on/off and displays all 
known gateways including their announced bandwidth. To monitor the bridge loop 
avoidance batctl offers a new parameter to display the the bridge neighbor 
table while highlighting the 'gateway to LAN'. The bisect component now can 
deal with the 32Bit sequence numbers in the OGMs and the bat-hosts parser 
became more robust while replacing MAC addresses with bat-host names.

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