Keepalived is a freeware which doesnt really mean Free of any expenses. Efforts made on this project are targetting long term support and evolution. After more than 20 years of maturation, the current code has reached the initial goals and roadmap I firstly fixed and is ready for the next step. Making the code widely accessible and open offers a way to improve robustness and quickly merge nice ideas coming along. This code is running on very large infrastructures in numerous of data centers, ISP, hardware/software vendors all around the world. If you think you can help by offering sponsoring for a Keepalived release then you are right ! lot of new ideas are around, more than time :)

By the past, the following sponsors offered their help by funding addition of new features :

Global IPv6 support in Keepalived has been jointly sponsored by PICTURA and PCEXTREME. Special thanks go to tech team at PCEXTREME and PICTURA for time spent on testing and reporting issues. Please visit sponsors websites ! Focus for this release has been made on a massive code rewrite to fully support IPv6 in VRRP and IPVS frameworks.

Security extensions and core daemon re-design has been sponsored by Tiscover AG, thanks go to their IT team and especially to Jacob Rief for design discussions and testing time. Please visit sponsor Homepage at www.tiscover.com. This release is a major daemon re-design to increase security and availability of Keepalived itself. The daemon is split into 3 process, one parent and 2 childrens. Parent monitor children availability. One children for VRRP and another for Healthcheckers. Added support to a modularized watchdog framework. Watchdog estart children if they die or enter scheduling deadloop. Splitted parsing keyword tree for each relevant daemon. Added dedicated syslog facility for each children. Modularized parser. Extended pidfile & memory framework. Fixed a virtual_server_group issue while reloading conf. Extended IPVS wrapper. Extended netlink code to support scope selection.

VRRP high performance and optimization extensions has been sponsored by IBM. Added support to a global shared buffer for incoming advert handling. Added support to pre-allocated shared buffer for outgoing adverts. Extended socket pool design to support shared fd for outbound channel. Added support to static_ipaddress as global keyword. Extended track_interface to support multiple interface tracking. Review the instance lookup design to use o(1) scheduling design to reduce VRRP scheduling jitter using a customized hash index. Review the sync_group design to speed up synchronization using a pre-computed index. Optimized VRRP timer fd lookup using a one pass lookup. Bradley Baetz, extended the scheduler framework to support child process handling. Bradley Baetz, fixed the misc_check healthchecker using new thread child scheduling facility. Added support to a shared kernel netlink command channel. Extended logging code to support verbose log output. Extended gratuitous ARP code to support shared buffer and shared socket. Fixed a gratuitous ARP issue, extended the code for sending garp over device ipaddess belong to. Extended the ipaddress framework to point directly to interface reflected by netlink channel instead of storing device index. Extended VRRP scheduling timer computation to support timer auto-recalibration to provide overhead auto-adaptation. Extended VRRP scheduler to support fd hash table design, this speed up instance lookup while computing instance sands. Extended vrrp new socket creation to replace refreshed instance fd into fd hash table index. Extended vrrp framework to support blank virtual_ipaddress block. Extended watchdog framework to support polling delay selection via daemon command line. Extended the genhash code to support verbose output selection, command arg '-v' will generate a very verbose output. list library has been extended to support multi-sized list & specific element deletion. Some name clean-up, cosmetics extensions.

Loadbalancing framewok extensions has been sponsored by edNET, www.ednet.co.uk. This release added support to virtual_server_group that provide support for real_server to belong to multiple virtual_server without launching a bunch of healthcheckers. Extended the differentiate configuration parser to support virtual_server_group differentiate entries and preserve IPVS working topology. Added support to IP address range support for virtual_server_group. SIGCHLD extension. Extended VRRP virtual_routes to support source route selection. Some cosmetics patches.

VRRP framewok extensions has been sponsored by Ecomdevel LLC, www.gigenet.com. Extended netlink kernel reflection to support routings. Added support to static_routes set/removed during daemon bootstrap/shutdown. Added support to virtual_routes set/removed according to VRRP FSM. Extended virtual_ipaddress and virtual_ipaddress_excluded block to specify dedicated device interface for each ipaddress. Added support to track_interface for interface state monitoring (same as HSRP). Rewrote the VRRP VIP & E-VIP memory representation. Optimized code dependence selection. Enhanced HTTP|SSL checkers to support 2KB buffer lenght GET query. Some cosmetics and code cleaning work.