BFD for Dynamic Routing Protocols
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BFD for Dynamic Routing Protocols

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BFD for Dynamic Routing Protocols

In addition to BFD for static routes, the firewall supports BFD for the BGP, OSPF, and RIP routing protocols.
The Palo Alto Networks® implementation of multihop BFD follows the encapsulation portion of RFC 5883, Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) for Multihop Paths but does not support authentication. A workaround is to configure BFD in a VPN tunnel for BGP. The VPN tunnel can provide authentication without the duplication of BFD authentication.
When you enable BFD for OSPFv2 or OSPFv3 broadcast interfaces, OSPF establishes a BFD session only with its Designated Router (DR) and Backup Designated Router (BDR). On point-to-point interfaces, OSPF establishes a BFD session with the direct neighbor. On point-to-multipoint interfaces, OSPF establishes a BFD session with each peer.
The firewall does not support BFD on an OSPF or OSPFv3 virtual link.
Each routing protocol can have independent BFD sessions on an interface. Alternatively, two or more routing protocols (BGP, OSPF, and RIP) can share a common BFD session for an interface.
When you enable BFD for multiple protocols on the same interface, and the source IP address and destination IP address for the protocols are also the same, the protocols share a single BFD session, thus reducing both dataplane overhead (CPU) and traffic load on the interface. If you configure different BFD profiles for these protocols, only one BFD profile is used: the one that has the lowest Desired Minimum Tx Interval. If the profiles have the same Desired Minimum Tx Interval, the profile used by the first created session takes effect. In the case where a static route and OSPF share the same session, because a static session is created right after a commit, while OSPF waits until an adjacency is up, the profile of the static route takes effect.
The benefit of using a single BFD session in these cases is that this behavior uses resources more efficiently. The firewall can use the saved resources to support more BFD sessions on different interfaces or support BFD for different source IP and destination IP address pairs.
IPv4 and IPv6 on the same interface always create different BFD sessions, even though they can use the same BFD profile.
If you implement both BFD for BGP and HA path monitoring, Palo Alto Networks recommends you not implement BGP Graceful Restart. When the BFD peer’s interface fails and path monitoring fails, BFD can remove the affected routes from the routing table and synchronize this change to the passive HA firewall before Graceful Restart can take effect. If you decide to implement BFD for BGP, Graceful Restart for BGP, and HA path monitoring, you should configure BFD with a larger Desired Minimum Tx Interval and larger Detection Time Multiplier than the default values.