Technical Summary
This memo documents an enhancement to the OSPF routing protocol,
whereby an OSPF router can stay on the forwarding path even as its
OSPF software is restarted. This is called "graceful restart" or
"non-stop forwarding". Deployment of this mechanism in the service
provider networks should decrease unnecessary path recalculation and
traffic rerouting.
Working Group Summary
The WG considered two proposals to address the graceful restart
problem--the one represented in draft-nguyen-ospf-restart, and the
one described in the submitted document. The main difference between
the two proposals was in the mechanism for graceful restart
signaling, database synchronization and determining when graceful
restart had completed. At the 50th IETF in Minneapolis the WG made a
decision via rough consensus to proceed with the latter approach,
which since then has receive substantial technical review within the
WG and passed the WG Last Call. The described mechanism has been
implemented and deployed by several vendors.
Protocol Quality
The specification has been reviewed for the IESG by Alex Zinin.