Solved Netmap/VALE switch feature support?

[ianc1215]

I have been trying to find information of exactly what Netmap / VALE currently support on FreeBSD-13.0-RELEASE. I was to access the valectl tools on my test box but beyond adding ports to the defined vswitch I am not really sure what else can be done. Does VALE support VLANs and other features? When I searched around I found various mailing lists and GitHub comments referring to things being added to VALE but they all seemed dated.

What is the current status of VALE? Can it do advanced features? If so which tools are used, do I use ifconfig to manipulate things once I have defined the switch and port? The documentation seems awfully lean.

 

[Ole]

I haven't tried and don't know the status of VALE/VLAN, but this scheme (for bhyve and vnet jails) has been working well for me for several years. Some observations:

- netmap/vale not economical in terms of memory consumption ( default values sysctl -a | grep netmap |grep size too small );
- everything works pretty stable if no external interface is added to the VALE switch (also when using vether-kmod you should always recompile the module with every kernel update);
- VALE/NETMAP is faster than if_bridge(4) + tap(4) in my performance tests. But this is not the only fast solution - netgraph(3) gives the same results and is also faster than the classic if_bridge + tap (also with Netgraph you can use different netgraph modules like ALTQ/IPFW/QoS (for jail + bhyve/VM traffic shaping/FW).. ), which is not available with other options. Therefore, NETMAP/VALE may have fewer advantages than netgraph;

 

[ianc1215]

Thanks for the information, I think I might need to look elsewhere for my solution. VALE I think is still not quite on the feature level I am looking for. Perhaps I would be better just sticking with the default network toolset until VALE matures a bit more.