The routing protocols are the bird's heart and a fine amount of code is dedicated to their management and for providing support functions to them. (-: Actually, this is the reason why the directory with sources of the core code is called When talking about protocols, one need to distinguish between A protocol is represented by a Each instance has its own The protocol hooks are described in the next chapter, for more information about configuration of protocols, please refer to the configuration chapter and also to the description of the Protocol states

As startup and shutdown of each protocol are complex processes which can be affected by lots of external events (user's actions, reconfigurations, behavior of neighboring routers etc.), we have decided to supervise them by a pair of simple state machines -- the protocol state machine and a core state machine.

The

Unless the protocol is in the At any time, the core code can ask the protocol to shut itself down by calling its stop() hook.

The Functions of the protocol module

The protocol module provides the following functions: