Hello! The -R option basically prohibits local forwarding table cleanup before the BGP settles. It tries to not break your local routing by simply starting BIRD. Maria On 2023-10-16 18:44, Pavlos Parissis wrote:

Hi all,

I am using latest 2.x version of Bird and I have a question about graceful restart.

I have `graceful restart on` for BGP protocol and I currently perform below steps when I want to utilize it: 1. birdc graceful restart 2. systemctl start bird.service

According to the documentation I need `-R` command-line option, thus I have adjusted systemd unit file accordingly: ``` ExecStart=/usr/sbin/bird -R -f -u bird -g bird ```

How does the aforementioned command-line option behave when `birdc graceful restart` is not issued? I scanned the code to understand it and I think bird is smart enough to know that a graceful restarted was not requested and it doesn't do anything during the startup.

While I was testing graceful restart functionality, I noticed that even without the aforementioned command-line option the upstream peer does not remove the routes until restart timeout expires. So, I was wondering if that option is real needed thus the question.

Regards, Pavlos

-- Maria Matejka (she/her) | BIRD Team Leader | CZ.NIC, z.s.p.o.