NAME
vmx —
VMware VMXNET3 Virtual Interface
Controller device
SYNOPSIS
vmx* at pci? dev ? function ?
DESCRIPTION
The
vmx driver provides support for the VMXNET3 virtual NIC
available in virtual machines by VMware. It appears as a simple Ethernet
device but is actually a virtual network interface to the underlying host
operating system.
This driver supports the
VMXNET3 driver protocol, as an
alternative to the emulated
pcn(4),
wm(4) interfaces also available
in the VMware environment. The
vmx driver is optimized for
the virtual machine, it can provide advanced capabilities depending on the
underlying host operating system and the physical network interface controller
of the host. In comparison to the earlier VMXNET versions, VMXNET3 supports
additional features like multiqueue support, IPv6 checksum offloading,
MSI/MSI-X support and hardware VLAN tagging in VMware's VLAN Guest Tagging
(VGT) mode.
The
vmx driver supports VMXNET3 VMware virtual NICs provided
by the virtual machine hardware version 7 or newer, as provided by the
following products:
- VMware ESX/ESXi 4.0 and
newer
- VMware Server 2.0 and
newer
- VMware Workstation 6.5 and
newer
- VMware Fusion 2.0 and
newer
The
vmx driver supports the following media types:
-
-
- autoselect
- Enable autoselection of the media type and options. The
driver always uses the fastest available speed and the media options
provided by the underlying host of the virtual machine.
-
-
- 10GbaseT mediaopt
full-duplex
- Set 10Gbps operation.
-
-
- 1000baseT mediaopt
full-duplex
- Set 1000Mbps operation.
For more information on configuring this device, see
ifconfig(8).
EXAMPLES
The following entry must be added to the VMware configuration file to provide
the
vmx device:
ethernet0.virtualDev = "vmxnet3"
SEE ALSO
arp(4),
ifmedia(4),
intro(4),
netintro(4),
pci(4),
pcn(4),
wm(4),
ifconfig(8)
HISTORY
The
vmx device driver first appeared in
OpenBSD 5.5 and was ported for
NetBSD
7.0.
AUTHORS
The
vmx driver was originally written by
Tsubai Masanari.
NetBSD
porting was done by
Hikaru ABE
<
hikaru@NetBSD.org>.