FRRouting, usually shortened to FRR, is a free routing protocol suite that turns a Linux or BSD machine into a fully fledged router. It was announced in April 2017 as a fork of Quagga, itself the descendant of GNU Zebra, when long-time contributors and companies such as Cumulus Networks, 6WIND, Orange and Big Switch Networks decided to take the code base forward at a faster pace. The project lives under The Linux Foundation as a collaborative project, and its code is released under the GPL version 2 or later.
Many products rely on it without carrying its name: VyOS uses it for its routing protocols, Cumulus Linux built it in, and plenty of hosting providers run it to announce their prefixes over BGP from ordinary Linux servers.
What FRRouting is for
FRR splits routing into several independent programs. A central daemon called zebra talks to the operating system kernel and keeps the routing table up to date. Around it runs one daemon per protocol: bgpd for BGP, ospfd and ospf6d for OSPF over IPv4 and IPv6, isisd for IS-IS, ripd and ripngd for RIP, pimd for multicast, ldpd for MPLS, bfdd for fast failure detection, plus Babel, VRRP, OpenFabric and policy-based routing. According to the documentation, this separation means a crash in one protocol does not bring the others down. The administrator works from a single shell named vtysh, whose syntax is very close to what Cisco equipment uses.
FRR only handles the control plane, meaning the computation of routes and their exchange with neighbours. Packet forwarding stays with the Linux kernel, which is why some features depend on the kernel version: the documentation states that MPLS needs at least kernel 4.5, VRFs need 4.8, and EVPN or PIM need 4.18. FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD are supported as well, with a slightly smaller feature set.
Within this software library, FRR stands apart from its neighbours. OpenBGPD, born in OpenBSD, speaks BGP only and aims for simplicity, whereas FRR covers around ten protocols and advanced features such as EVPN, route reflectors or Flowspec. VyOS embeds FRR but wraps it in a complete configuration system with firewall, NAT and VPN. GNS3 and EVE-NG are lab environments in which FRR containers can be run for practice. In real deployments, FRR builds data centre fabrics with BGP and EVPN-VXLAN, turns a server into a route reflector, announces anycast addresses, or connects a Kubernetes cluster to the physical network, something projects like Cilium take advantage of directly.
Who is it for?
FRRouting is aimed first at network engineers, hosting providers, data centre operators and teams that automate their infrastructure with tools such as Ansible. It is also a fine learning ground for anyone preparing a certification or wanting to understand BGP and OSPF from the inside, since everything is configured and observed from the console.
The tool makes real demands, though. There is no graphical interface, and installing it assumes you are comfortable administering a Linux system. FRR does not provide a firewall, NAT, VPN or DHCP server: if you want a complete router that is ready to use, VyOS, which already includes FRR, is the better choice. It does not monitor the network either, a job that belongs to something like LibreNMS. Finally, forwarding performance is that of the Linux kernel, which is enough for most situations but does not replace hardware with dedicated switching chips.
Download FRRouting safely
The official release is published on frrouting.org, which points to the current version, 10.7.1, dated 25 August 2026 according to the project site. Source code is kept in the FRRouting/frr repository on GitHub. For a quick installation, the project maintains its own package repositories, deb.frrouting.org for Debian and Ubuntu and rpm.frrouting.org for Red Hat and its derivatives, with an frr-stable channel and channels for each release series. An official Docker image is published on quay.io as frrouting/frr. Packages shipped by the distributions themselves also work, but they are often several versions behind.
FRR has no paid edition and no account to create. Because the software is delivered as packages, the main risk comes from unsigned third-party repositories or archives dropped on generic download sites. The safe habit is to import the GPG key listed on deb.frrouting.org or rpm.frrouting.org before adding the repository, and never to install an frr package that does not come from the project or from your distribution.
Frequently asked questions
Is FRRouting free?
Yes. FRRouting is free software released under the GPL version 2 or later, with no commercial edition. Companies that embed it in their products, such as VyOS Networks, may sell support around it, but the FRR code itself is the same for everyone.
What is the difference between FRRouting and Quagga?
FRR is a fork of Quagga created in 2017 by part of its developers, who wanted a faster development pace. Since then FRR has added many protocols and features, including EVPN, BFD, VRRP and policy-based routing, and it has become the active reference project. Quagga itself has barely changed since.
Can FRRouting run on Windows?
Not natively. FRR runs on Linux and on the BSD systems. On Windows you can still run it inside a virtual machine, a container, or a GNS3 or EVE-NG lab, which is more than enough for learning and testing.
