Feature request: CARP awareness in BIRD?

[Thomas Steen Rasmussen]

Hello :)

I am using BIRD on FreeBSD and it is working okay, apart from missing 
CARP awareness. I am wondering if anyone knows if work has been done in 
this area already?

As you may know, CARP is a patent-free VRRP alternative originally from 
OpenBSD. A network interface can have one or more VHIDs, each VHID can 
be either MASTER or BACKUP. The IPs tied to a VHID are only usable when 
the VHID is MASTER.

Currently "birdc show interfaces" shows no difference between two nodes 
where one is CARP MASTER and the other is CARP BACKUP. The consequence 
of this is that BIRD thinks it has a working local direct route which it 
then tries to use, but the OS refuses, since it understands that VHID is 
CARP BACKUP.

Ideally BIRD would understand CARP semantics so when it has a DIRECT 
protocol it would only consume the routes from CARP MASTER VHIDs, and 
consider the CARP BACKUP VHID IPs as unusable.

Please consider this a feature request. I am interested getting some 
BIRD experts opinion on 1) is this a feature you would be willing to 
include in BIRD and 2) how big a job is it?

I would be willing to pay to have it developed, although I am just 
myself so I don't have unlimited funds.

Thanks in advance, and thank you for BIRD; even without CARP support it 
is already awesome.

Best regards,

Thomas Steen Rasmussen