FD.io VPP  v18.07.1-19-g511ce25
Vector Packet Processing
Startup Configuration

The VPP network stack comes with several configuration options that can be provided either on the command line or in a configuration file.

Specific applications built on the stack have been known to require a dozen arguments, depending on requirements. This section describes commonly-used options and parameters.

You can find command-line argument parsers in the source code by searching for instances of the VLIB_CONFIG_FUNCTION macro. The invocation VLIB_CONFIG_FUNCTION(foo_config, "foo") will cause the function foo_config to receive all the options and values supplied in a parameter block named "`foo`", for example: foo { arg1 arg2 arg3 ... }.

Todo:
Tell the nice people where this document lives so that the might help improve it!

Command-line arguments

Parameters are grouped by a section name. When providing more than one parameter to a section all parameters for that section must be wrapped in curly braces.

1 /usr/bin/vpp unix { interactive cli-listen 127.0.0.1:5002 }

Which will produce output similar to this: 

<startup diagnostic messages>
    _______    _        _   _____  ___ 
 __/ __/ _ \  (_)__    | | / / _ \/ _ \
 _/ _// // / / / _ \   | |/ / ___/ ___/
 /_/ /____(_)_/\___/   |___/_/  /_/    

vpp# <start-typing>

When providing only one such parameter the braces are optional. For example, the following command argument, unix interactive does not have braces:

1 /usr/bin/vpp unix interactive

The command line can be presented as a single string or as several; anything given on the command line is concatenated with spaces into a single string before parsing.

VPP applications must be able to locate their own executable images. The simplest way to ensure this will work is to invoke a VPP application by giving its absolute path; for example: /usr/bin/vpp <options>. At startup, VPP applications parse through their own ELF-sections (primarily) to make lists of init, configuration, and exit handlers.

When developing with VPP, in gdb it's often sufficient to start an application like this at the (gdb) prompt:

1 run unix interactive

Configuration file

It is also possible to supply parameters in a startup configuration file the path of which is provided to the VPP application on its command line.

The format of the configuration file is a simple text file with the same content as the command line but with the benefit of being able to use newlines to make the content easier to read. For example:

1 unix {
2  nodaemon
3  log /var/log/vpp/vpp.log
4  full-coredump
5  cli-listen localhost:5002
6 }
7 api-trace {
8  on
9 }
10 dpdk {
11  dev 0000:03:00.0
12 }

VPP is then instructed to load this file with the -c option:

1 /usr/bin/vpp -c /etc/vpp/startup.conf

Index of startup command sections

src/plugins/acl

DPDK and pcap tx

src/plugins/mactime

src/plugins/map

src/plugins/nat

Unix Interface

Circular Journal

Command line session

src/vlibmemory

vHost User

src/vnet/dns

src/vnet/ip

src/vnet/l2

src/vnet/l2tp

src/vnet/session

src/vnet/tcp

src/vnet/unix

src/vpp/oam

src/vpp/stats

src/vpp/vnet