[Linux-vrf-general] Loopback address and scalability problems in VRF

[Yue L. <yu...@gm...>]

Hi, James and VRF users,
We are doing experiment of large scale routing protocol testing using VRF
and XORP. We want to
run multiple XORP instances on a single machine, each XORP instance resides
in one VRF. We use VRF because it is much more light weight than virtual
machines. The VRF version we are using is 0.900. Now we found two problems:
1. As known, XORP adopts a multi-process architecture, the processes (belong
to one XORP instance) bind to different port numbers and communicate through
the loopback address 127.0.0.1. But it seems that there is no loopback
address in VRFs (other than 0). Because many network applications are using
this default loopback address I think this limitation may hinder a lot of
applications to run on top of VRF.

2. The current version has a scalability limit, so we can not create more
than 7 VRFs.

So I wonder whether there is a new version or patch which can solve the two
problems above. I am grateful for any of your suggestions. Thanks.

- Yue