February 22, 2026
Rust routes, drama boots
Holo v0.9: A Modern Routing Stack Built in Rust
Rust router glow-up has fans cheering and skeptics squinting
TLDR: Holo v0.9 adds big security and stability upgrades to a Rust-built routing stack, plus testing receipts. The crowd is hyped—especially dn42 tinkerers—while skeptics want long, boring uptime before calling it a win, making this a fun Rust vs “do we need a rewrite?” moment.
Holo v0.9 just landed, and the comments came in hot: “wildly good” was the mood as Rust-loving net nerds celebrated a routing stack that feels like a lock-and-alarm upgrade for the internet’s plumbing. The team packed in security moves—cryptographic locks on messages, protections against copy‑cat “replay” attacks, and even a watchdog so nasty packets can’t crash the system—plus quieter network chatter and a new “virtual links” trick to connect distant routers. They also showed receipts with lab compliance tests and signed Docker images for supply‑chain sanity.
In the thread, early adopters went full hype, with one fan itching to run it on dn42 (a community‑built mini‑internet where hobbyists play ISP). Meanwhile, the classic drama hovered: Rust stans say this is how you make network gear safe in 2026; skeptics mutter “do we really need another rewrite?” and ask for months of boring uptime before they believe. The jokes basically wrote themselves—“three‑way handshake” got winks, and someone joked the spell checker is the real hero. Love it or side‑eye it, the vibe is clear: security-first, tested, and ready for tinkering, with pros waiting to see if it stays stable when the traffic gets spicy.
Key Points
- •Holo v0.9 adds extensive IS-IS features and protections, implementing multiple RFCs (5310, 7987, 7602, 6232/6233, 7917, 5303, 8491) and distributed flooding reduction (draft-ietf-lsr-distoptflood-12).
- •OSPF gains support for virtual links via the holo-ospf component.
- •The daemon now embeds the git commit hash in version output; CI adds Docker image provenance attestations and spell checking.
- •Documentation updates include SECURITY.md and conformance testing details; results from Ixia IxANVL compliance tests are provided with noted false positives.
- •The codebase received internal API refactors, new fuzz targets, panic supervision against DoS from malformed packets, and general bug fixes/performance improvements.