vale vs bridge

[Farhan Khan]

Hi all,

What's the difference between vale and a bridge? The only thing that I gather thus far is that bridge is a simple forwarder, irrespective of the destined mac address, whereas vale will verify based on the mac since its a switch? Is this an over-simplification or accurate or mistaken?

 

[Phishfry]

I was wondering the same myself and found your thread.
vale(1) and netmap(4) sound very interesting for 10Gbe and beyond.

Did you get a chance to try it out?
https://github.com/Flipkart/netmap

netmap can generate traffic at line rate (14.88Mpps) on a 10GigE link with just a single core running at 900Mhz

http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/netmap/#d9cd

 

[Phishfry]

Hey good news. I was updating FreeBSD 12.0-BETA2 to BETA4 and saw bridge.8 flash by onscreen.
It piqued my interest and now I see we have a manual for the netmap bridge example.
man /usr/src/tools/tools/netmap/bridge.8

bridge is a simple netmap application that bridges packets between two
netmap ports. If the two netmap ports use the same netmap memory region
bridge forwards packets without copying the packets payload (zero-copy
mode), unless explicitly prevented by the -c flag.

So VALE stands for VirtuAl Local Ethernet. The bridge can be part of a netmap API VALE software switch.

Here is a ipfw for netmap.
https://github.com/luigirizzo/netmap-ipfw

Netgate has been working on it too.
https://github.com/Netgate/netmap-fwd

Here are some Hackernews comments that seem to give context. Used for high speed sniffing with Suricata.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12022015