Assigning dedicated ring groups to VNICs helps in better resource isolation. Enforcing hardware SLAs on the VNICs enables hardware anti-spoofing for the VNICs.
For physical links, ring-group, which is a read-only property, indicates whether the driver supports the dedicated ring group feature. You cannot enable or disable this feature for physical datalinks.
For VNICs, the ring-group property can be specified only during the VNIC's creation, as described in the following procedure. You cannot set the property on already existing VNICs.
Before You Begin
Ensure that your role has the appropriate rights profile to perform this procedure. See Using Rights Profiles to Perform Network Configuration.
$ dladm show-linkprop -p ring-group linkname
$ dladm create-vnic -l linkname -p ring-group=value VNIC
Specifies whether the VNIC can be assigned their own ring group. The valid values are:
auto – Specifies whether exclusive or shared is used on a particular physical link is decided by the system. The default value is auto.
exclusive – Specifies that the VNIC creation must fail if exclusive ring group is not available.
shared – Specifies that the dedicated resources are not allocated.
$ dladm show-linkprop -p ring-group VNIC
$ dladm show-phys -H linkname
This example shows how to create a VNIC that has exclusive ring group.
$ dladm show-linkprop -p ring-group net1 LINK PROPERTY PERM VALUE EFFECTIVE DEFAULT POSSIBLE net1 ring-group r- exclusive exclusive -- shared, exclusive
$ dladm create-vnic -l net1 -p ring-group=exclusive vnic5
$ dladm show-linkprop -p ring-group vnic5 LINK PROPERTY PERM VALUE EFFECTIVE DEFAULT POSSIBLE vnic5 ring-group r- exclusive exclusive auto auto,shared, exclusive
$ dladm show-phys -H net3 LINK RINGTYPE RINGS CLIENTS net1 RX 0-31 <default,mcast> net1 RX 33-36 vnic5 net1 TX 0-31 <default> net1 TX 33-36 vnic5Example 74 Displaying the Rx Rings and Tx Rings for a VNIC With Exclusive Ring Group
This example displays the Rx and Tx rings in the EFFECTIVE field for a VNIC that has exclusive ring group.
$ dladm show-linkprop -p rx-rings,tx-rings vnic1 LINK PROPERTY PERM VALUE EFFECTIVE DEFAULT POSSIBLE vnic1 rx-rings r- -- 4 -- -- vnic1 tx-rings r- -- 4 -- --Example 75 Creating a VNIC With the ring-group and bw-share Properties
This example shows the creation of a VNIC by specifying the ring group along with the share of bandwidth.
$ dladm show-linkprop -p ring-group net1 LINK PROPERTY PERM VALUE EFFECTIVE DEFAULT POSSIBLE net1 ring-group r- exclusive exclusive -- shared, exclusive $ dladm create-vnic -l net2 -p ring-group=exclusive,bw-share=80 vnic1 $ dladm create-vnic -l net2 -p ring-group=exclusive,bw-share=20 vnic2 $ dladm show-linkprop -p ring-group,bw-share vnic1 LINK PROPERTY PERM VALUE EFFECTIVE DEFAULT POSSIBLE vnic1 ring-group r- exclusive exclusive auto auto,shared, exclusive vnic1 bw-share rw 80 80% -- 1-100
SR-IOV mode supports VNICs with the ring-group property set to exclusive. You can create a VNIC in the SR-IOV mode only if the iov property of the VNIC is either auto or off. If the iov property is set to on, then the VNIC creation fails. For more information about SR-IOV VNICs, see Using Single Root I/O Virtualization With VNICs.
The anet resource of Oracle Solaris zones supports the ring-group property. The value that can be set for this property is the same as that of a VNIC. Similar to VNIC creation, you cannot create an anet resource if the iov property is set to on and ring-group is set to exclusive. For more information, see Oracle Solaris Zones Configuration Resources.
When the ring-group property of a VNIC has the value exclusive, you can offload the SLA implementation in MAC to the NIC only if the NIC supports hardware SLAs. The offloading helps to save the CPU cycles. For more information, see Setting Hardware SLA Properties for VF VNICs.
During VNIC creation, if the ring-group property is set to auto or exclusive, the VNIC tries to get a hardware flow from the underlying link. If the flow allocation is successful, the VNIC uses the existing ring group interface to initialize the Tx or Rx ring groups for this flow. Then, the ring groups are usable and exclusively owned by this VNIC.