VALE(4)                FreeBSD Kernel Interfaces Manual                VALE(4)

NAME
     vale - a very fast Virtual Local Ethernet using the netmap API

SYNOPSIS
     device netmap

DESCRIPTION
     vale is a feature of the netmap(4) module that implements multiple
     Virtual switches that can be used to interconnect netmap clients,
     including traffic sources and sinks, packet forwarders, userspace
     firewalls, and so on.

     vale is implemented completely in software, and is extremely fast.  On a
     modern machine it can move almost 20 Million packets per second (Mpps)
     per core with small frames, and about 70 Gbit/s with 1500 byte frames.

OPERATION
     vale dynamically creates switches and ports as clients connect to it
     using the netmap(4) API.

     vale ports are named valeSSS:PPP where vale is the prefix indicating a
     VALE switch rather than a standard interface, SSS indicates a specific
     switch (the colon is a separator), and PPP indicates a port within the
     switch.  Both SSS and PPP have the form [0-9a-zA-Z_]+ , the string cannot
     exceed IFNAMSIZ characters, and PPP cannot be the name of any existing OS
     network interface.

     See netmap(4) for details on the API.

   LIMITS
     vale currently supports up to 8 switches, with 254 ports per switch.

SYSCTL VARIABLES
     See netmap(4) for a list of sysctl variables that affect vale bridges.

EXAMPLES
     Create one switch, with a traffic generator connected to one port, and a
     netmap-enabled tcpdump instance on another port:

           tcpdump -ni valea:1 &
           pkt-gen  -i valea:0 -f tx &

     Create two switches, each connected to two qemu machines on different
     ports.

           qemu -net nic -net netmap,ifname=vale1:a ... &
           qemu -net nic -net netmap,ifname=vale1:b ... &
           qemu -net nic -net netmap,ifname=vale2:c ... &
           qemu -net nic -net netmap,ifname=vale2:d ... &

SEE ALSO
     netmap(4)

     Luigi Rizzo, Giuseppe Lettieri: VALE, a switched ethernet for virtual
     machines, June 2012, http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/vale/

AUTHORS
     The vale switch was designed and implemented in 2012 by Luigi Rizzo and
     Giuseppe Lettieri at the Universita` di Pisa.

     vale was funded by the European Commission within FP7 Projects CHANGE
     (257422) and OPENLAB (287581).

FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE-p6        February 6, 2020        FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE-p6