I am a little confused as to how this attribute will work. Ideally I would like a state table that persists across numerous iterations of stopping/starting bro (broctl deploy).
To get this to work do I simply need the &persistent attribute and Bro magically handles the rest?
Or do I also need to use the functions checkpoint_state() (in bro_done) with rescan_state (in bro_init) to load the tables?
The former: at startup and termination checkpoint_state() and
rescan_state are called automatically, respectively. You can in
addition call them during operation for checkpointing/rereading the
state on the fly.
That said, please note that &persistent is going to go away, it will
likely be deprecated starting with Bro 2.6. Broker's data stores are
going to be the primary replacement.