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.
This includes the following:
- use separate memory regions for VALE ports
- locking fixes
- some simplifications in the NIC-specific routines
- performance improvements for the VALE switch
- some new features in the pkt-gen test program
- documentation updates
There are small API changes that require programs to be recompiled
(NETMAP_API has been bumped so you will detect old binaries at runtime).
In particular:
- struct netmap_slot now is 16 bytes to support an extra pointer,
which may save one data copy when using VALE ports or VMs;
- the struct netmap_if has two extra fields;
MFC after: 3 days
that revises the netmap memory allocator so that the
various parameters (number and size of buffers, rings, descriptors)
can be modified at runtime through sysctl variables.
The changes become effective when no netmap clients are active.
The API is mostly unchanged, although the NIOCUNREGIF ioctl now
does not bring the interface back to normal mode: and you
need to close the file descriptor for that.
This change was necessary to track who is using the mapped region,
and since it is a simplification of the API there was no
incentive in trying to preserve NIOCUNREGIF.
We will remove the ioctl from the kernel next time we need
a real API change (and version bump).
Among other things, buffer allocation when opening devices is
now much faster: it used to take O(N^2) time, now it is linear.
Submitted by: Giuseppe Lettieri
http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/vale/
VALE lets you dynamically instantiate multiple software bridges
that talk the netmap API (and are *extremely* fast), so you can test
netmap applications without the need for high end hardware.
This is particularly useful as I am completing a netmap-aware
version of ipfw, and VALE provides an excellent testing platform.
Also, I also have netmap backends for qemu mostly ready for commit
to the port, and this too will let you interconnect virtual machines
at high speed without fiddling with bridges, tap or other slow solutions.
The API for applications is unchanged, so you can use the code
in tools/tools/netmap (which i will update soon) on the VALE ports.
This commit also syncs the code with the one in my internal repository,
so you will see some conditional code for other platforms.
The code should run mostly unmodified on stable/9 so people interested
in trying it can just copy sys/dev/netmap/ and sys/net/netmap*.h
from HEAD
VALE is joint work with my colleague Giuseppe Lettieri, and
is partly supported by the EU Projects CHANGE and OPENLAB
