The Pktgen Application

Pktgen, (Packet Gen-erator) is a software based traffic generator powered by the DPDK fast packet processing framework.

Some of the features of Pktgen are:

  • It is capable of generating 10Gbit wire rate traffic with 64 byte frames.
  • It can act as a transmitter or receiver at line rate.
  • It has a runtime environment to configure, and start and stop traffic flows.
  • It can display real time metrics for a number of ports.
  • It can generate packets in sequence by iterating source or destination MAC, IP addresses or ports.
  • It can handle packets with UDP, TCP, ARP, ICMP, GRE, MPLS and Queue-in-Queue.
  • It can be controlled remotely over a TCP connection.
  • It is configurable via Lua and can run command scripts to set up repeatable test cases.
  • The software is fully available under a BSD licence.

Pktgen was created 2010 by Keith Wiles @ windriver.com, now at intel.com

See the sections below for more details.

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