[ovs-discuss] Test OVS kernel module using only one machine

[Kyle Mestery (kmestery)]

On Dec 18, 2012, at 8:19 AM, Ahmed Talha Khan <auny87 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I am not aware of the internal port functionality. Can you kindly elaborate your answer a bit more. Also what do you mean by "add IP configuration on your bridge port"? How will that help in sending traffic in?
> 
Internal ports are internal ports created in OVS on the bridge. You can use them on the host itself for different purposes, one of which is you can apply IP configuration onto them. For the VXLAN testing I did, I would use this functionality, for example. If you test does not require IP, then just configure the port up and send traffic into it. Add another internal port to receive the traffic on.

> 
> On Tue, Dec 18, 2012 at 7:14 PM, Kyle Mestery (kmestery) <kmestery at cisco.com> wrote:
> On Dec 18, 2012, at 7:58 AM, Ahmed Talha Khan <auny87 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hey Ben,Jesse,Kyle,ALL,
> >
> > I made some changes in the kernel module and would like to test them. Ideally I would want to test it on a single machine that i am on without firing up other vms(eg kvm/qemu integration). I would like to know what is the preferred method used by the community for this.
> >
> > I thought of using a combination of tcpreplay and TAP devices to achieve this. I only want send traffic into ovs-port 1, receive it in the kernel mod, and send it out to  ovs-port 2 after doing my processing.  Since I was trying to use tcpreplay,which is an out-bound utility(sends traffic out of the stack), I need to make some interface on which i replay this traffic. I made a TAP interface for this, since that can be used to inject packets into the network stack. The problem is that when i replay the traffic on this TAP device it is not received inside OVS obviously because the TAP device only sends up the traffic to kernel but ovs will not receive it since it  is not coming form any OVS port.
> >
> > Then there is a way to make 2 TAP devices, bridge them, play traffic on one of them and add the 2nd one to ovs. But that is not possible since OVS and linux bridge module cannot co-exist.
> >
> > So the questions is how to input traffic into ports, in a non-programmatic way, without external vms.
> >
> > Also, are there any tests in the /test directory to test the datapath functionality independent of the userland ovs code?
> >
> I usually just use OVS internal ports for this. Either add IP configuration on your bridge port itself, or just create another internal port and use that for your tests.
> 
> Thanks,
> Kyle
> 
> >