VALE, a Virtual Local Ethernet. http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/vale/

[Andreas Nilsson]

I just read the paper and it looks really promising :)

I decided to test it and downloaded
http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/netmap/20120608-netmap-picobsd-head-amd64.bin(
thanks for making it easy to test! )

I booted it up in kvm and it works great!

I got 8.86Mpps (64-byte) in the image, that is nice :) I however wanted to
test somewhat more realistic traffic flow, but I could not find any nice
way to do it. I tried to start a pkt-gen receiver with 2 threads and then
launch 2 senders, but that lead to a kernel panic ;)

Fatal trap 12: page fault while in kernel mode
cpuid = 0; apic id = 00
fault virtual address   = 0x471
fault code                 = supervisor read data, page not present
instruction pointer     = ...
stack pointer             = ...
frame pointer            = ...
code segment           = base 0x0, limit 0xfffff, type 0x1b
                               = DPL 0, pres 1, long 1, def32 0, gran 1
processor eflags        = interupt enabled, resume, IOPL = 0
current process         = 108 (pkg-gen)

I guess that was not the way to achieve a more realstic IMIX ;)

Best regards
Andreas

On Fri, Jun 8, 2012 at 7:11 PM, Luigi Rizzo <rizzo at iet.unipi.it> wrote:

> We have just completed a netmap extensions that let you build a
> local high speed switch called VALE which i think can be very useful.
>
>        http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/vale/
>
> VALE is a software Virtual Local Ethernet whose ports are accessible
> using the netmap API. Designed to be used as the interconnect between
> virtual machines (or as a fast local bus), it works as a learning
> bridge and supports speeds of up to 20 Mpps with short frames, and
> an aggregate 70 Gbit/s with 1514-byte packets. The VALE paper
> contains more details and performance measurements.
>
> VALE is implemented as a small extension of the netmap module, and
> is available for FreeBSD and Linux. The source code includes a
> backend for qemu and KVM, so you can use VALE to interconnect virtual
> machines launching them with
>
>        qemu -net nic -net netmap,ifname=vale0 ...
>        qemu -net nic -net netmap,ifname=vale1 ...
>        ...
>
> Processes can talk to a VALE switch too, so you can use the pkt-gen
> or bridge tools that are part of the netmap distribution, or even
> the pcap.c module that maps libpcap calls into netmap equivalents.
> This lets you use VALE for all sort of pcap-based applications.
>
> More details, code, bootable images on the VALE page,
>
>        http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/vale/
>
> feedback welcome, as usual.
>
> cheers
> luigi
> -----------------------------------------+-------------------------------
>  Prof. Luigi RIZZO, rizzo at iet.unipi.it  . Dip. di Ing. dell'Informazione
>  http://www.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/        . Universita` di Pisa
>  TEL      +39-050-2211611               . via Diotisalvi 2
>  Mobile   +39-338-6809875               . 56122 PISA (Italy)
> -----------------------------------------+-------------------------------
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