utils

Utilities for NF developer setup/etc

Creating a Developer environment with vagrant

1. Clone this repository, MoonGen, and NetBricks into the same parent directory.

   $ for repo in utils MoonGen NetBricks; do \
       git clone git@github.com:williamofockham/${repo}.git; \
     done

2. Install Vagrant and VirtualBox.
3. Install the vagrant-disksize (required) and vagrant-vbguest (recommended) vagrant-reload (required) plugins:

   $ vagrant plugin install vagrant-disksize vagrant-vbguest vagrant-reload

4. Boot the VM:

   $ cd utils
   $ vagrant up

The above steps will prepare your virtual machine with all of the appropriate DPDK settings (multiple secondary NICs, install kernel modules, enable huge pages, bind the extra interfaces to DPDK drivers) and the sandbox Docker image.

If you have MoonGen and NetBricks cloned as described in step 1 above, those repositories will be shared into the VM at /MoonGen and /NetBricks respectively.

Design of our Docker images

ubuntu/xenial                        (upstream)
+- williamofockham/dpdk              (container-friendy DPDK build)
   +- williamofockham/sandbox        (base image, copies in MoonGen)
   /  +- williamofockham/netbricks   (NFV framework)
+- williamofockham/moongen           (traffic/packet generator)

Most times you will want to run the williamofockham/netbricks container, which includes all of the other tools. This is started by default in the Vagrant setup.

The goal of our structure here is to avoid requiring rebuilding each of the frameworks every time. We use multi-staged image builds based on ubuntu/xenial, which is the same as the host OS in the Vagrant setup above. The williamofockham/dpdk image is built in this repository from the contents of the dpdk directory, and the williamofockham/sandbox image is built from the Dockerfile.sandbox in the root directory. The other images are built from their respective repositories.

Because DPDK has a lot of requirements from the host OS, many files and directories are mounted into the container, which also runs in "privileged" mode. The following mounts are required (and handled in most docker.mk files in our repositories):

# Kernel modules and headers
/lib/modules
/usr/src

# Access to the host PCI bus
/sys/bus/pci/drivers

# Access to huge pages
/sys/kernel/mm/hugepages

# Access to NUMA configuration
/sys/devices/system/node

# Enumerating kernel modules
/sbin/modinfo
/bin/kmod
/sbin/lsmod

# Device nodes
/dev

# Huge-pages filesystem
/mnt/huge

# Sharing DPDK runtime configuration or unix sockets
/var/run