Vector Packet Processing - Part IV - Testing and Verification

As I work through the documentation on fd.io, it discusses Installation, and then there is a section called "Running VPP".

The first error I encountered in this documentation had to do with running the VPP Shell. The documentation said to run the following command: "sudo vppctl -s run/vpp/cli-vpp.sock"

On a CentOS7 installation, the cli-vpp.sock file is actually called "cli.sock", not "cli-vpp.sock".  So in correcting this, indeed, I see a CLI shell, which I will show further down.

So there is a CLI to master with this. And to be any kind of guru, one will need to learn this. It does look like a more or less "standardized" CLI, with syntax commands that include the familiar, "show", "set", etc. I ran the "help" command to get a dump of commands, which showed a hefty number of sub-commands to potentially learn.

I decided to run a fairly simple "show interface" command, to see what that would produce. And, here is the result of that.

"show interface" results from VPP shell CLI - all interfaces down

So the CLI sees 4 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces, all in a state of "down". 

This server has two dual-port NIC cards, so it makes sense to me that there would be two found on GigabitEthernet1. Why there is only a single interface found on GigabitEthernet3, I need to look into (seems there should also be two of these). The local0 interface, I presume, is a NIC that is on the motherboard (I could see people confusing local0 with a loopback). 

If you proceed with the dp.io documentation, it actually instructs you to set up a veth pair - not the actual physical NICs on the box - and create interfaces that way and enable them, and then do some tracing. It probably makes some sense to do that, before trying to bring these Gigabit Ethernet NICs up and test those. Why? Well, for one reason, you could knock your connectivity to the server out, which would be bad. So let's leave our physical NICs alone for the time being.

So next step, we will run the veth steps and the tracing steps on the dp.io website.

Then, after that, I noticed there is a VPP Testing site on GitHub.

https://github.com/FDio/vpp/tree/master/test

It is written in Python, so you could run your Makefile commands and, hopefully, run these easily.