Ah! It does. Thank you for your help. I was able to test the sample
applications in PF_RING ZC with VirtualBox.  I don't know why the
documentation led me to believe I needed a ZC-specific driver.

Now, to figure out how to evaluate our own application ...

Thanks again for your quick response.

John

On Wed, Feb 18, 2015 at 8:01 AM, Alfredo Cardigliano <[email protected]>
wrote:

> Hi John
> for testing the API you do not need DNA/ZC drivers, you can use the ZC API
> (sample apps, balancing, etc.) with standard drivers (opening the device
> without the “zc:” prefix).
>
> Alfredo
>
> On 18 Feb 2015, at 14:57, John Zachary <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Thank you for this information, Alfredo.
>
> I am not worried about performance right now.  Our focus is to test some
> PF_RING functionality for our application and see what we need to do to our
> application to support PF_RING before we commit.  So, I am happy to do
> everything in a guest VM (Centos7): install PF_RING, install DNA or ZC
> drivers, and test our application under simulated conditions.  Right now,
> we are happy to test either DNA or ZC (or both) just to prove things work,
> mainly load balancing (packet hashing).  We will use tcpreplay to test our
> application, not live traffic.  Once we are happy it works like we want, we
> will move to a production-ready platform with real cards with ZC.
>
> My challenge has been a disconnect between drivers on a guest VM and the
> DNA/ZC drivers.  My first approach was to try Centos7 on VirtualBox with an
> e1000 driver.  However, I can't seem to build the DNA e1000 driver from the
> PF_RING source (make and compile errors) and there are no pre-built RPMs.
> Also, reading through the source code, I notice that all of the scripts &
> Makefile commands for building an e1000 driver are commented out.  So, I
> assumed e1000 was unsupported.
>
> My next approach is to try an Amazon EC2 VM that supports either igb
> ixgbe, and hopefully use the prebuilt ZC driver.  If that fails, I guess I
> will try VMware.
>
> To summarize, I really want to use PF_RING and DNA or ZC in a
> proof-of-concept for our application to show others that it will work;
> performance is not important to me right now.  Is my use case reasonable
> for test-driving PF_RING DNA or ZC?  Am I missing something obvious,
> especially with building a DNA e1000 driver on Virtualbox?
>
> Many thanks in advance,
> John
>
> On Wed, Feb 18, 2015 at 4:04 AM, Alfredo Cardigliano <[email protected]
> > wrote:
>
>> Hi John
>> e1000 cards are supported by DNA only,
>> e1000e cards are supported by DNA and ZC,
>> please note that:
>> - even if you use DNA/ZC drivers in the guest os, you still have all the
>> overhead in the host os/hypervisor
>>   (for 10G we use PCI-passthrough/Direct-IO with DNA/ZC for line-rate on
>> VMs, or ZC with a master
>>   process on the host sending packets to a sw queue for zero-copy
>> host-guest communications)
>> - you will not get a significative performance improvement at the rates
>> supported by e1000 cards
>> - in most case e1000 cards are not able to do line-rate anyway
>>
>> Alfredo
>>
>> > On 16 Feb 2015, at 20:15, John Zachary <[email protected]> wrote:
>> >
>> > Hello,
>> >
>> > I am looking for a link to the latest support of PF_RING with either ZC
>> or DNA support on virtual guest machines.  We want to evaluate PF_RING for
>> our application and wish to test it out.  I am trying to bring everything
>> up on a Centos7 guest on VirtualBox 4.3.20r96996 with either virtio or
>> intel 82545EM NIC support.  It seems that the latest version of PF_RING
>> software doesn't support e1000 cards (and it looks like e1000e might be on
>> its way out, too, yes?).  If anyone can point me towards a solution, either
>> some way to force Vbox to work or suggest alternatives (VMware? something
>> else?), I would really appreciate it.  I don't want to buy a license if the
>> answer is "it doesn't work on VMware either" :)
>> >
>> > I've look all over the web to answer my questions before posting,
>> assuming this has been asked before, but I don't find much information
>> about PF_RING and virtualization in the user community.
>> >
>> > John
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > Ntop-misc mailing list
>> > [email protected]
>> > http://listgateway.unipi.it/mailman/listinfo/ntop-misc
>>
>>
>
>
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