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BGP Graceful Restart & High Availability

Complex

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The problem: control plane restarts disrupt forwarding

BGP runs in software on the router's control plane (CPU). When the control plane crashes, reboots, or software upgrades, the default behavior is: BGP sessions drop, peers withdraw routes, traffic is black-holed for minutes while BGP reconverges.

Graceful Restart and Non-Stop Forwarding solve this: the data plane (FIB/hardware) continues forwarding during the control plane outage while peers maintain stale routes.

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