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34 .Nd a very fast Virtual Local Ethernet using the netmap API
41 module that implements multiple Virtual switches that can
42 be used to interconnect netmap clients, including traffic
43 sources and sinks, packet forwarders, userspace firewalls,
47 is implemented completely in software, and is extremely fast.
48 On a modern machine it can move almost 20 Million packets per
49 second (Mpps) per core with small frames, and about 70 Gbit/s
50 with 1500 byte frames.
53 dynamically creates switches and ports as clients connect
63 is the prefix indicating a VALE switch rather than a standard interface,
65 indicates a specific switch (the colon is a separator),
68 indicates a port within the switch.
69 Both SSS and PPP have the form [0-9a-zA-Z_]+ , the string cannot
70 exceed IFNAMSIZ characters, and PPP cannot be the name of any
71 existing OS network interface.
75 for details on the API.
78 currently supports up to 254 ports per switch. The maximum
79 number of switches is provided by the max_bridges sysctl variable.
83 for a list of sysctl variables that affect
87 Create one switch, with a traffic generator connected to one
88 port, and a netmap-enabled tcpdump instance on another port:
89 .Bd -literal -offset indent
91 pkt-gen -i valea:0 -f tx &
95 each connected to two qemu machines on different ports.
96 .Bd -literal -offset indent
97 qemu -net nic -net netmap,ifname=vale1:a ... &
98 qemu -net nic -net netmap,ifname=vale1:b ... &
99 qemu -net nic -net netmap,ifname=vale2:c ... &
100 qemu -net nic -net netmap,ifname=vale2:d ... &
105 Luigi Rizzo, Giuseppe Lettieri: VALE, a switched ethernet for virtual machines,
106 June 2012, http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/vale/
111 switch was designed and implemented in 2012 by
114 .An Giuseppe Lettieri
115 at the Universita` di Pisa.
118 was funded by the European Commission within FP7 Projects
119 CHANGE (257422) and OPENLAB (287581).