WARNING - OLD ARCHIVES

This is an archived copy of the Xen.org mailing list, which we have preserved to ensure that existing links to archives are not broken. The live archive, which contains the latest emails, can be found at http://lists.xen.org/
   
 
 
Xen 
 
Home Products Support Community News
 
   
 

xen-users

Re: [Xen-users] strange ethtool output in xen environment

To: xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [Xen-users] strange ethtool output in xen environment
From: John Haxby <john.haxby@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 2009 11:01:02 +0000
Delivery-date: Fri, 13 Nov 2009 03:02:26 -0800
Envelope-to: www-data@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
In-reply-to: <514217.68029.qm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
List-help: <mailto:xen-users-request@lists.xensource.com?subject=help>
List-id: Xen user discussion <xen-users.lists.xensource.com>
List-post: <mailto:xen-users@lists.xensource.com>
List-subscribe: <http://lists.xensource.com/mailman/listinfo/xen-users>, <mailto:xen-users-request@lists.xensource.com?subject=subscribe>
List-unsubscribe: <http://lists.xensource.com/mailman/listinfo/xen-users>, <mailto:xen-users-request@lists.xensource.com?subject=unsubscribe>
References: <514217.68029.qm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sender: xen-users-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1.4pre) Gecko/20091014 Fedora/3.0-2.8.b4.fc11 Lightning/1.0pre Thunderbird/3.0b4
On 12/11/09 12:59, Fasiha Ashraf wrote:
I want to check the speed like features of my Ethernet in dom0 and domUs. But in virtualized environment it gives strange output why is that so? how to check it otherwise?
Non-virtualized FC11
[root@fasiha home]# ethtool eth0

The question makes no sense, really.   The speed of a NIC is dependent on physical characteristics: the speed at which it can generate and observe a signal.   A virtual NIC doesn't have those physical characteristics and the emulated NIC in a domU doesn't know what physical hardware is going to actually send or receive signals.  A virtual NIC can report a speed, but if it does, it's just lying so that it can give some plausible answer.

In dom0 you do have access to the physical NIC: it might be eth0 but it might be something else.   On different machines, "eth0" might be different things depending on how the bridge is set up.  On a reasonably "standard" xen 3.4.0 eth0 is a bridge and the NIC is peth0 (you can see that from brctl show).   Bridges don't correspond to NICs so "ethtool eth0" is relatively useless.

In domU you have a virtual NIC and since ethtool is reporting physical characteristics, anything you might or might not see is made up by the driver.

jch
_______________________________________________
Xen-users mailing list
Xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users
<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>