Running VPP

Using the files we create in :ref`settingupenvironment` we will now start and run VPP.

VPP runs in userspace. In a production environment you will often run it with DPDK to connect to real NICs or vhost to connect to VMs. In those circumstances you usually run a single instance of VPP.

For purposes of this tutorial, it is going to be extremely useful to run multiple instances of VPP, and connect them to each other to form a topology. Fortunately, VPP supports this.

Using the files we created in setup we will start VPP.

$ sudo /usr/bin/vpp -c startup1.conf
vlib_plugin_early_init:361: plugin path /usr/lib/vpp_plugins:/usr/lib/vpp_plugins
load_one_plugin:189: Loaded plugin: abf_plugin.so (ACL based Forwarding)
load_one_plugin:189: Loaded plugin: acl_plugin.so (Access Control Lists)
load_one_plugin:189: Loaded plugin: avf_plugin.so (Intel Adaptive Virtual Function (AVF) Device Plugin)
.........
$

If VPP does not start you can try adding nodaemon to the startup.conf file in the unix section. This should provide more information in the output.

startup.conf example with nodaemon:

unix {nodaemon cli-listen /run/vpp/cli-vpp1.sock}
api-segment { prefix vpp1 }
plugins { plugin dpdk_plugin.so { disable } }

The command vppctl will launch a VPP shell with which you can run VPP commands interactively.

We should now be able to execute the VPP shell and show the version.

$ sudo vppctl -s /run/vpp/cli-vpp1.sock
    _______    _        _   _____  ___
 __/ __/ _ \  (_)__    | | / / _ \/ _ \
 _/ _// // / / / _ \   | |/ / ___/ ___/
 /_/ /____(_)_/\___/   |___/_/  /_/

vpp# show version
vpp v18.07-release built by root on c469eba2a593 at Mon Jul 30 23:27:03 UTC 2018
vpp#

Note

Use ctrl-d or q to exit from the VPP shell.

If you are going to run several instances of VPP this way be sure to kill them when you are finished.

You can use something like the following:

$ ps -eaf | grep vpp
root      2067     1  2 05:12 ?        00:00:00 /usr/bin/vpp -c startup1.conf
vagrant   2070   903  0 05:12 pts/0    00:00:00 grep --color=auto vpp
$ kill -9 2067
$ ps -eaf | grep vpp
vagrant   2074   903  0 05:13 pts/0    00:00:00 grep --color=auto vpp