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man pages section 4: Device and Network Interfaces

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Updated: Wednesday, July 27, 2022
 
 

vtionet(4D)

Name

vtionet - Virtio network driver

Synopsis

/dev/vtionet 

Description

The vtionet Ethernet driver is a multi-threaded, loadable, clonable, GLD-based STREAMS driver supporting the Data Link Provider Interface, dlpi(4P), for Virtio network device instances.

The vtionet driver supports multiple Virtio network device instances installed within the system.

The vtionet driver functions include including Virtio queue and buffer initialization, frame transmit and receive, promiscous and multicast support, and error recovery and reporting.

APPLICATION PROGRAMMING INTERFACE

The cloning character-special device, /dev/vtionet, is used to access all Virtio network device instances installed within the system.

The vtionet driver is managed by the dladm(8) command line utility, which allows VLANs to be defined on top of vtionet instances and for vtionet instances to be aggregated. See dladm(8) for more details.

You must send an explicit DL_ATTACH_REQ message to associate the opened stream with a particular device (PPA). The PPA ID is interpreted as an unsigned integer data type and indicates the corresponding device instance (unit) number. The driver returns an error (DL_ERROR_ACK) if the PPA field value does not correspond to a valid device instance number.

The values returned by the driver in the DL_INFO_ACK primitive in response to the DL_INFO_REQ are as follows:

  • Maximum SDU (with jumbo frame) is as high as 65535.

  • Minimum SDU is 0. The driver pads to the mandatory 60-octet minimum packet size.

  • The dlsap address length is 8.

  • MAC type is DL_ETHER.

  • The sap length value is −2, means that the physical address component is followed immediately by a 2-byte sap component within the DLSAP address.

  • The broadcast address value is Ethernet/IEEE broadcast address (FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF).

CONFIGURATION

The vtionet driver is managed by the dladm(8) command line utility.

The vtionet driver always reports link speed of 1Gb/s and full duplex mode. This does not reflect the speed and mode of the host interface or any rate caps.

Files

/dev/vtionet

Character special device.

/kernel/drv/vtionet.conf

Driver configuration file.

/kernel/drv/amd64/vtionet

x86 kernel module.

Attributes

See attributes(7) for descriptions of the following attributes:

ATTRIBUTE TYPE
ATTRIBUTE VALUE
Availability
driver/network/ethernet/vtionet
Architecture
x86
Interface Stability
Committed

See Also

streamio(4I), dlpi(4P), driver.conf(5), attributes(7), dladm(8), netstat(8), vtio(4D)

Writing Device Drivers in Oracle Solaris 11.4

STREAMS Programming Guide

Managing Network Virtualization and Network Resources in Oracle Solaris 11.4

Managing Network Datalinks in Oracle Solaris 11.4

Virtio I/O Device (VIRTIO) Version 1.1, Committee Specification 01

https://docs.oasis-open.org/virtio/virtio/v1.1/virtio-v1.1.html