pdump

New in version 2.6.0.

Warning

DPDK pdump support is deprecated in OVS and will be removed in next releases.

pdump allows you to listen on DPDK ports and view the traffic that is passing on them. To use this utility, one must have libpcap installed on the system. Furthermore, DPDK must be built with CONFIG_RTE_LIBRTE_PDUMP=y and CONFIG_RTE_LIBRTE_PMD_PCAP=y. OVS should be built with --enable-dpdk-pdump configuration option.

Warning

A performance decrease is expected when using a monitoring application like the DPDK pdump app.

To use pdump, simply launch OVS as usual, then navigate to the app/pdump directory in DPDK, make the application and run like so:

$ sudo ./build/app/dpdk-pdump -- \
    --pdump port=0,queue=0,rx-dev=/tmp/pkts.pcap

The above command captures traffic received on queue 0 of port 0 and stores it in /tmp/pkts.pcap. Other combinations of port numbers, queues numbers and pcap locations are of course also available to use. For example, to capture all packets that traverse port 0 in a single pcap file:

$ sudo ./build/app/dpdk-pdump -- \
    --pdump 'port=0,queue=*,rx-dev=/tmp/pkts.pcap,tx-dev=/tmp/pkts.pcap'

Note

XDG_RUNTIME_DIR environment variable might need to be adjusted to OVS runtime directory (/var/run/openvswitch in most cases) for dpdk-pdump utility if OVS started by non-root user.

Many tools are available to view the contents of the pcap file. Once example is tcpdump. Issue the following command to view the contents of pkts.pcap:

$ tcpdump -r pkts.pcap

More information on the pdump app and its usage can be found in the DPDK documentation.