NAME
vmx
—
VMware VMXNET3 Virtual Interface
Controller device
SYNOPSIS
vmx* at pci? dev ? function ?
DESCRIPTION
Thevmx
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>.