Our engineers at Larch Networks delivered hardware-accelerated BFD+ (Bidirectional Forwarding Detection Plus) for SONiC network operating system — bringing deterministic, ultra-fast failure detection to real-world deployments.
In modern networks, milliseconds can be the difference between a clean reroute and a visible outage. BFD+ provides a lightweight “heartbeat” between neighbors so the network can detect failures quickly and trigger convergence faster — helping protect SLAs and reduce micro-outages. At very short intervals, pure software BFD can suffer from CPU load, scheduling jitter, and control-plane contention — especially during incidents. A hardware approach delivers predictable timing, stable behavior under stress, and better scalability.
Marvell platforms include an OAM engine that can generate and detect packets, but BFD+ requires more than that:
– state / config negotiation
– robust session logic
– flexible timing across intervals.
We addressed these gaps by developing custom firmware for the CM3 co-processor, enabling full BFD+ behavior without the complexity of traffic-generator limitations (e.g., single-interval constraints per generator).
Final Result: up to 64 concurrent BFD+ sessions with intervals down to 3 ms.