Hi! First of all, thank your for your question. It's good to know that the rework is really watched by the community.
> I am very curious about the new "channels" feature from the int-new > branch. > > I understand it is supposed to replace import and export filters by > connecting protocols to routing tables. What is the motivation for this > change, and how does it work from a high-level perspective? Will it be > part of Bird 2? Import and export filters should stay as they were before. The "channels" feature is just an internal abstraction layer between routing tables and protocols. It was the best way chosen by us to allow protocols connect to several tables at once, like multiprotocol BGP. In the configuration, the only change worth mentioning is that your old config protocol bgp { table t1; import ...; export ...; igp table it; ... } should change to something like protocol bgp { ipv4 { table t1; import ...; export ...; }; ipv6 { table t2; import ...; export ...; }; vpn4 { ... }; igp ipv4 table it4; igp ipv6 table it6; ... } No replacing of filters is planned for the integrated version, at least in near future. If one of our crazy ideas comes true, we may add Lua as a possible language to write filters in (in several years' perspective) and maybe also deprecate the current, then-legacy filter language in far future. MQ