Most relevant features:
- netmap emulation on any NIC, even those without native netmap support.
On the ixgbe we have measured about 4Mpps/core/queue in this mode,
which is still a lot more than with sockets/bpf.
- seamless interconnection of VALE switch, NICs and host stack.
If you disable accelerations on your NIC (say em0)
ifconfig em0 -txcsum -txcsum
you can use the VALE switch to connect the NIC and the host stack:
vale-ctl -h valeXX:em0
allowing sharing the NIC with other netmap clients.
- THE USER API HAS SLIGHTLY CHANGED (head/cur/tail pointers
instead of pointers/count as before). This was unavoidable to support,
in the future, multiple threads operating on the same rings.
Netmap clients require very small source code changes to compile again.
On the plus side, the new API should be easier to understand
and the internals are a lot simpler.
The manual page has been updated extensively to reflect the current
features and give some examples.
This is the result of work of several people including Giuseppe Lettieri,
Vincenzo Maffione, Michio Honda and myself, and has been financially
supported by EU projects CHANGE and OPENLAB, from NetApp University
Research Fund, NEC, and of course the Universita` di Pisa.
