BGP soft reconfiguration is triggered by unrelated commits

Bugs
1

Hello,

I ran into an issue where a commit triggers BGP soft reconfiguration even when the change has nothing to do with BGP.

For example:

vyos@BORDER1# set system time-zone 'Europe/Amsterdam'
vyos@BORDER1# commit

After this, BGP soft reconfiguration is started.

In my opinion, changing system time-zone should not affect BGP soft reconfiguration at all. I have also never seen this behavior on hardware routers.

Is there a way to disable BGP soft reconfiguration on every commit, or prevent it from being triggered by unrelated configuration changes?

Thank you in advance for your help!

2

Hey Boris,
Testing it myself, I can confirm that changing the time zone on the router does trigger a BGP soft reconfig.

However, on a process level, this appears to be an expected outcome since the underlying daemon (FRR) relies on the system clock for triggers.

3

@Boris if you update the descripton on an Interface does it cause BGP soft reconfig?

4

Yes, changing the interface description also triggered a BGP soft reconfiguration in my case.

set int eth eth3 description test
commit

In the frr-reload.log I can see the following right after the commit:

2026-04-01 07:29:23,818  INFO: Called via "Namespace(input=None, reload=True, test=False, debug=False, log_level='info', stdout=False, pathspace=None, filename='/run/frr/config/vyos.frr.conf', overwrite=False, bindir='/usr/bin', confdir='/etc/frr', rundir='/var/run/frr', vty_socket=None, daemon='', test_reset=False, logfmt=False, logfile='/var/log/frr/frr-reload.log')"
2026-04-01 07:29:23,818  INFO: Loading Config object from file /run/frr/config/vyos.frr.conf
2026-04-01 07:29:23,872  INFO: Loading Config object from vtysh show running
2026-04-01 07:29:24,025  INFO: "frr version 10.5.1" cannot be removed
2026-04-01 07:29:24,025  INFO: "service integrated-vtysh-config" cannot be removed
2026-04-01 07:29:24,041  INFO: Executed "no hostname BORDER1"
...

2026-04-01 07:29:25,890  INFO: Loading Config object from vtysh show running
2026-04-01 07:29:26,044  INFO: "frr version 10.5.1" cannot be removed
2026-04-01 07:29:26,044  INFO: "service integrated-vtysh-config" cannot be removed
2026-04-01 07:29:26,046  INFO: /var/run/frr/reload-FNTOGI.txt content
...

And below that, all my BGP configuration is re-applied again (e.g. router bgp ..., route-map ..., etc.).

5

The behavior is expected in VyOS. Under the hood VyOS uses frr-reload to apply all configuration changes, which does a full config diff and restores any changed sections. Since FRR manages both system config and BGP in the same daemon config file, any commit that produces a different frr.conf results in frr-reload detecting changes and triggering soft-reconfig to ensure BGP state stays consistent. There is no clean way to prevent this from happening on unrelated commits in the current VyOS architecture. What you can do is batch your configuration changes and do fewer commits - stage multiple changes and commit them all at once, which at least reduces the frequency of reconfigurations. If this is causing real operational issues due to unexpected BGP route advertisement changes, it would be worth raising a GitHub issue with the VyOS project to request more granular handling in frr-reload, specifically to avoid triggering BGP soft-reconfig when only non-routing config sections change.

Shout if you need more details.