Cisco Cisco IOS Software Release 12.0(22)S

To enable Bidirectional Protocol Independent Multicast (bidir-PIM), use the ip pim bidir-enable global 
configuration command. To disable bidir-PIM, use the no form of this command. 

This command has no arguments or keywords.

Disabled

Global configuration

Bidir-PIM is disabled by default to ensure complete backward compatibility when upgrading a router to 
Cisco IOS Release 12.0(18)ST or a later release.

When bidir-PIM is disabled, the router will behave similarly to a router without bidir-PIM support. The 
following conditions will apply:

PIM hello messages sent by the router will not contain the bidirectional mode option.

The router will not send designated forwarder (DF) election messages and will ignore DF election 
messages it receives.

The ip pim rp-address, ip pim send-rp-announce, and ip pim rp-candidate global configuration 
commands will be treated as follows:

If these commands are configured when bidir-PIM is disabled, bidirectional mode will not be a 
configuration option.

If these commands are configured with the bidirectional mode option when bidir-PIM is enabled 
and then bidir-PIM is disabled, these commands will be removed from the command-line 
interface (CLI). In this situation, these commands must be configured again with the 
bidirectional mode option when bidir-PIM is reenabled.

The df keyword for the show ip pim interface EXEC configuration command and debug ip pim 
privileged EXEC configuration command is not supported.

The following example shows how to configure a rendezvous point (RP) for both sparse mode and 
bidirectional mode groups. 224/8 and 227/8 are bidirectional groups, 226/8 is sparse mode, and 225/8 is 
dense mode. The RP must be configured to use different IP addresses for the sparse mode and 

12.0(18)ST

This command was introduced.

12.0(22)S

This command was integrated into Cisco IOS Release 12.0(22)S.