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

[Luigi Rizzo]

On Mon, Jun 11, 2012 at 06:32:36PM +0200, Andreas Nilsson wrote:
> 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

well, 8.86Mpps with no receivers i guess ? Otherwise i should really
update my numbers :)

> 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 ;)

as you found out, the code has some rough edges especially when
dealing with resource shortage.
One thing i forgot to mention (i just updated the main page) is
to run the hypervisor with a sufficient amount of memory, e.g.
-m 512 (for qemu).
But i will need to investigate a bit more what happens with
multiple receiving threads.

cheers
luigi

> 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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