OS Preparation

Getting Started with Napatech Link-Virtualization™ Software

Platform
Napatech SmartNIC
Content Type
Getting Started
Getting Started Guide
Capture Software Version
Link-Virtualization™ Software 4.5

Enable IOMMU and huge-page memory before installing Napatech Link-Virtualization™ Software.

Napatech Link-Virtualization™ Software is available for Linux systems on the Intel 64 and AMD64 architectures with virtualization extensions and the KVM hypervisor.

Supported Linux OS and kernel versions

Napatech Link-Virtualization™ Software supports Linux OS and kernel versions as follows:

Host machine:
  • Link-Virtualization™ Software is tested and qualified against Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. Derivatives of RHEL (CentOS, Fedora) are likely also working, but not officially supported.
  • Kernel 4.18 or newer versions.
Virtual machine:
  • Any Linux OS with kernel 5.0 or newer versions for the kernel-mode network support.
  • Any Linux OS with kernel 4.18 or newer versions for the DPDK-based network support.
    Note: DPDK 19.11 or newer versions are supported in a VM.

Begin the installation by enabling IOMMU and huge-page memory. Both of these features are enabled by modification of the grub configuration file. These features require a system restart to take effect and are persistent across system restarts.