Bird Internet routing daemon

BIRD is an open source implementation for routing packets on Unix-like operating systems. It was developed as a school project at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University, Prague, and is distributed under the GNU General Public License.

BIRD supports Internet Protocol version 4 and version 6 by running separate daemons. It establishes multiple routing tables, and uses , , and OSPF routing protocols, as well as statically defined routes. Its design differs significantly from GNU Zebra and Quagga. Currently BIRD is included in many Linux distributions, such as Debian,Ubuntu and Fedora.

BIRD is used in several Internet exchanges, such as the London Internet Exchange (LINX),LONAP,DE-CIX and MSK-IX) as a route server, where it replaced Quagga because of its scalability issues. According to the 2012 Euro-IX survey, BIRD is the most used route server amongst European Internet exchanges.

In 2010, CZ.NIC, the current sponsor of BIRD development, received the LINX Conspicuous Contribution Award for contribution of BIRD to the advancement in route server technology.

BIRD implements an internal routing table to which the supported protocols connect. Most of these protocols import network routes to this internal routing table and also export network routes from this internal routing table to the given protocol. This way information about network routes is exchanged among different routing protocols.