NAME
vmx —
VMware VMXNET3 Virtual Interface
Controller device
SYNOPSIS
vmx* at pci?
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),
em(4) and the
earlier VMXNET vic(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, as supported by the
vic(4) driver,
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), em(4), ifmedia(4), intro(4), netintro(4), pci(4), pcn(4), vic(4), hostname.if(5), ifconfig(8)
HISTORY
The vmx driver first appeared in
OpenBSD 5.5.
AUTHORS
The vmx driver was written by
Tsubai Masanari.