GoBFD
Production-grade BFD protocol daemon for Go

---

GoBFD is a production-grade Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) protocol daemon written in Go 1.26. It detects forwarding path failures between adjacent systems in milliseconds, enabling fast convergence for BGP, OSPF, and other routing protocols.

Four binaries: gobfd (daemon), gobfdctl (CLI), gobfd-haproxy-agent (HAProxy bridge), gobfd-exabgp-bridge (ExaBGP bridge).

Quick Start

# Build
git clone https://github.com/dantte-lp/gobfd.git && cd gobfd
make build

# Run tests
make test

# Start production stack (gobfd + Prometheus + Grafana)
podman-compose -f deployments/compose/compose.yml up -d

Requires Linux with CAP_NET_RAW and CAP_NET_ADMIN capabilities. See Deployment.

Architecture

graph TB
    subgraph "gobfd daemon"
        SRV["ConnectRPC<br/>:50051"]
        BFD["BFD Core<br/>FSM + Sessions"]
        NET["Raw Sockets<br/>UDP 3784/4784"]
        BGP["GoBGP Client"]
        MET["Prometheus<br/>:9100"]
    end

    CLI["gobfdctl<br/>CLI"] --> SRV
    HAP["gobfd-haproxy-agent"] --> SRV
    EXA["gobfd-exabgp-bridge"] --> SRV
    SRV --> BFD
    NET --> BFD
    BGP --> GOBGP["GoBGP :50052"]
    NET --> PEER["BFD Peers"]

    style BFD fill:#1a73e8,color:#fff

Loading

Documentation

Full documentation is available in docs/:

#	Document	Description
01	Architecture	System architecture, package diagram, packet flow
02	BFD Protocol	FSM, timers, jitter, packet format, authentication
03	Configuration	YAML config, env vars, GoBGP integration, hot reload
04	CLI Reference	gobfdctl commands, interactive shell
05	Interop Testing	4-peer testing: FRR, BIRD3, aiobfd, Thoro
06	Deployment	systemd, Podman Compose, packages, production
07	Monitoring	Prometheus metrics, Grafana dashboard, alerting
08	RFC Compliance	RFC compliance matrix, implementation notes
09	Development	Dev workflow, make targets, testing, linting
10	Changelog Guide	How to maintain CHANGELOG.md, semantic versioning
11	Integrations	BGP failover, HAProxy, observability, ExaBGP, Kubernetes

Documentation is also available in Russian at docs/ru/.

RFC Source Files

Full RFC texts are available in docs/rfc/: RFC 5880 | RFC 5881 | RFC 5882 | RFC 5883 | RFC 5884 | RFC 5885 | RFC 7130

RFC Compliance

RFC	Title	Status
RFC 5880	BFD Base Protocol	Implemented
RFC 5881	BFD for IPv4/IPv6 Single-Hop	Implemented
RFC 5882	Generic Application of BFD	Implemented
RFC 5883	BFD for Multihop Paths	Implemented
RFC 5884	BFD for MPLS LSPs	Stub
RFC 5885	BFD for PW VCCV	Stub
RFC 7130	Micro-BFD for LAG	Stub

Details: RFC Compliance

Key Features

• Table-driven FSM matching RFC 5880 Section 6.8.6 (no if-else chains)
• Five authentication modes (Simple Password, Keyed MD5/SHA1, Meticulous MD5/SHA1)
• BFD flap dampening for BGP integration (RFC 5882 Section 3.2)
• Zero-allocation packet codec with pre-built cached packets
• ConnectRPC/gRPC API + CLI with interactive shell
• Prometheus metrics + Grafana dashboard
• systemd integration (Type=notify, watchdog, SIGHUP hot reload)
• 4-peer interop testing (FRR, BIRD3, aiobfd, Thoro/bfd) + 5 integration examples
• Go 1.26 flight recorder for post-mortem debugging

Contributing

See Development for the full workflow.

make up && make all    # Build + test + lint
make interop           # Interoperability tests

License

Apache License 2.0