ovs-ctl(8) Open vSwitch Manual ovs-ctl(8)
NAME
ovs-ctl - OVS startup helper script
SYNOPSIS
ovs-ctl --system-id=random|uuid [options] start
ovs-ctl stop
ovs-ctl --system-id=random|uuid [options] restart
ovs-ctl status
ovs-ctl version
ovs-ctl [options] load-kmod
ovs-ctl --system-id=random|uuid [options] force-reload-kmod
ovs-ctl [--protocol=protocol] [--sport=sport] [--dport=dport]
enable-protocol
ovs-ctl help | -h | --help
ovs-ctl --version
DESCRIPTION
The ovs-ctl program starts, stops, and checks the status of Open
vSwitch daemons. It is not meant to be invoked directly by system
administrators but to be called internally by system startup scripts.
Each of ovs-ctl's commands is described separately below.
The ``start'' command
The start command starts Open vSwitch. It performs the following
tasks:
1. Loads the Open vSwitch kernel module. If this fails, and the
Linux bridge module is loaded but no bridges exist, it tries to
unload the bridge module and tries loading the Open vSwitch ker‐
nel module again. (This is because the Open vSwitch kernel mod‐
ule cannot coexist with the Linux bridge module before 2.6.37.)
The start command skips the following steps if ovsdb-server is already
running:
2. If the Open vSwitch database file does not exist, it creates it.
If the database does exist, but it has an obsolete version, it
upgrades it to the latest schema.
3. Starts ovsdb-server.
4. Initializes a few values inside the database.
5. If the --delete-bridges option was used, deletes all of the
bridges from the database.
6. If the --delete-transient-ports option was used, deletes all
ports that have other_config:transient set to true.
The start command skips the following step if ovs-vswitchd is already
running:
7. Starts ovs-vswitchd.
Options
Several command-line options influence the start command's behavior.
Some form of the following option should ordinarily be specified:
--system-id=uuid
--system-id=random
This specifies a unique system identifier to store into exter‐
nal-ids:system-id in the database's Open_vSwitch table. Remote
managers that talk to the Open vSwitch database server over net‐
work protocols use this value to identify and distinguish Open
vSwitch instances, so it should be unique (at least) within OVS
instances that will connect to a single controller.
When random is specified, ovs-ctl will generate a random ID that
persists from one run to another (stored in a file). When
another string is specified ovs-ctl uses it literally.
The following options should be specified if the defaults are not suit‐
able:
--system-type=type
--system-version=version
Sets the value to store in the system-type and system-version
columns, respectively, in the database's Open_vSwitch table.
Remote managers may use these values to determine the kind of
system to which they are connected (primarily for display to
human administrators).
When not specified, ovs-ctl uses values from the optional sys‐
tem-type.conf and system-version.conf files(see section FILES)
or it uses the lsb_release program, if present, to provide rea‐
sonable defaults.
The following options are also likely to be useful:
--external-id="name=value"
Sets external-ids:name to value in the database's Open_vSwitch
table. Specifying this option multiple times adds multiple key-
value pairs.
--delete-bridges
Ordinarily Open vSwitch bridges persist from one system boot to
the next, as long as the database is preserved. Some environ‐
ments instead expect to re-create all of the bridges and other
configuration state on every boot. This option supports that,
by deleting all Open vSwitch bridges after starting ovsdb-server
but before starting ovs-vswitchd.
--delete-transient-ports
Deletes all ports that have the other_config:transient value set
to true. This is important on certain environments where some
ports are going to be recreated after reboot, but other ports
need to be persisted in the database.
The following options are less important:
--daemon-cwd=directory
Specifies the current working directory that the OVS daemons
should run from. The default is / (the root directory) if this
option is not specified. (This option is useful because most
systems create core files in a process's current working direc‐
tory and because a file system that is in use as a process's
current working directory cannot be unmounted.)
--no-force-corefiles
By default, ovs-ctl enables core dumps for the OVS daemons.
This option disables that behavior.
--no-mlockall
By default ovs-ctl passes --mlockall to ovs-vswitchd, requesting
that it lock all of its virtual memory, preventing it from being
paged to disk. This option suppresses that behavior.
--ovsdb-server-priority=niceness
--ovs-vswitchd-priority=niceness
Sets the nice(1) level used for each daemon. All of them
default to -10.
--ovsdb-server-wrapper=wrapper
--ovs-vswitchd-wrapper=wrapper
Configures the specified daemon to run under wrapper, which is
one of the following:
valgrind
Run the daemon under valgrind(1), if it is installed,
logging to daemon.valgrind.log.pid in the log directory.
strace Run the daemon under strace(1), if it is installed, log‐
ging to daemon.strace.log.pid in the log directory.
glibc Enable GNU C library features designed to find memory
errors.
By default, no wrapper is used.
Each of the wrappers can expose bugs in Open vSwitch that lead
to incorrect operation, including crashes. The valgrind and
strace wrappers greatly slow daemon operations so they should
not be used in production. They also produce voluminous logs
that can quickly fill small disk partitions. The glibc wrapper
is less resource-intensive but still somewhat slows the daemons.
The following options control file locations. They should only be used
if the default locations cannot be used. See FILES, below, for more
information.
--db-file=file
Overrides the file name for the OVS database.
--db-sock=socket
Overrides the file name for the Unix domain socket used to con‐
nect to ovsdb-server.
--db-schema=schema
Overrides the file name for the OVS database schema.
--extra-dbs=file
Adds file as an extra database for ovsdb-server to serve out.
Multiple space-separated file names may also be specified. file
should begin with /; if it does not, then it will be taken as
relative to dbdir.
The ``stop'' command
The stop command does not unload the Open vSwitch kernel modules.
This command does nothing and finishes successfully if the OVS daemons
aren't running.
The ``restart'' command
The restart command performs a stop followed by a start command. The
command can take the same options as that of the start command. In
addition, it saves and restores OpenFlow flows for each individual
bridge.
The ``status'' command
The status command checks whether the OVS daemons ovs-vswitchd and
ovsdb-server are running and prints messages with that information. It
exits with status 0 if the daemons are running, 1 otherwise.
The ``version'' command
The version command runs ovsdb-server --version and ovs-vswitchd --ver‐
sion.
The ``force-reload-kmod'' command
The force-reload-kmod command allows upgrading the Open vSwitch kernel
module without rebooting. It performs the following tasks:
1. Gets a list of OVS ``internal'' interfaces, that is, network
devices implemented by Open vSwitch. The most common examples
of these are bridge ``local ports''.
2. Saves the OpenFlow flows of each bridge.
3. Stops the Open vSwitch daemons, as if by a call to ovs-ctl stop.
4. Saves the kernel configuration state of the OVS internal inter‐
faces listed in step 1, including IP and IPv6 addresses and
routing table entries.
5. Unloads the Open vSwitch kernel module (including the bridge
compatibility module if it is loaded).
6. Starts OVS back up, as if by a call to ovs-ctl start. This
reloads the kernel module, restarts the OVS daemons and finally
restores the saved OpenFlow flows.
7. Restores the kernel configuration state that was saved in step
4.
8. Checks for daemons that may need to be restarted because they
have packet sockets that are listening on old instances of Open
vSwitch kernel interfaces and, if it finds any, prints a warning
on stdout. DHCP is a common example: if the ISC DHCP client is
running on an OVS internal interface, then it will have to be
restarted after completing the above procedure. (It would be
nice if ovs-ctl could restart daemons automatically, but the
details are far too specific to a particular distribution and
installation.)
force-kmod-reload internally stops and starts OVS, so it accepts all of
the options accepted by the start command.
The ``load-kmod'' command
The load-kmod command loads the openvswitch kernel modules if they are
not already loaded. This operation also occurs as part of the start
command. The motivation for providing the load-kmod command is to allow
errors when loading modules to be handled separatetly from other errors
that may occur when running the start command.
By default the load-kmod command attempts to load the openvswitch ker‐
nel module.
The ``enable-protocol'' command
The enable-protocol command checks for rules related to a specified
protocol in the system's iptables(8) configuration. If there are no
rules specifically related to that protocol, then it inserts a rule to
accept the specified protocol.
More specifically:
· If iptables is not installed or not enabled, this command does
nothing, assuming that lack of filtering means that the protocol
is enabled.
· If the INPUT chain has a rule that matches the specified proto‐
col, then this command does nothing, assuming that whatever rule
is installed reflects the system administrator's decisions.
· Otherwise, this command installs a rule that accepts traffic of
the specified protocol.
This command normally completes successfully, even if it does nothing.
Only the failure of an attempt to insert a rule normally causes it to
return an exit code other than 0. The following options control the
protocol to be enabled:
--protocol=protocol
The name of the IP protocol to be enabled, such as gre or tcp.
The default is gre.
--sport=sport
--dport=dport
TCP or UDP source or destination port to match. These are
optional and allowed only with --protocol=tcp or --protocol=udp.
The ``help'' command
Prints a usage message and exits successfully.
OPTIONS
In addition to the options listed for each command above, this option
controls the behavior of several of ovs-ctl's commands.
EXIT STATUS
ovs-ctl exits with status 0 on success and nonzero on failure. The
start command is considered to succeed if OVS is already started; the
stop command is considered to succeed if OVS is already stopped.
ENVIRONMENT
The following environment variables affect ovs-ctl:
PATH ovs-ctl does not hardcode the location of any of the programs
that it runs. ovs-ctl will add the sbindir and bindir that were
specified at configure time to PATH, if they are not already
present.
OVS_LOGDIR
OVS_RUNDIR
OVS_DBDIR
OVS_SYSCONFDIR
OVS_PKGDATADIR
OVS_BINDIR
OVS_SBINDIR
Setting one of these variables in the environment overrides the
respective configure option, both for ovs-ctl itself and for the
other Open vSwitch programs that it runs.
FILES
ovs-ctl uses the following files:
ovs-lib
Shell function library used internally by ovs-ctl. It must be
installed in the same directory as ovs-ctl.
logdir/daemon.log
Per-daemon logfiles.
rundir/daemon.pid
Per-daemon pidfiles to track whether a daemon is running and
with what process ID.
pkgdatadir/vswitch.ovsschema
The OVS database schema used to initialize the database (use
--db-schema to override this location).
dbdir/conf.db
The OVS database (use --db-file to override this location).
rundir/openvswitch/db.sock
The Unix domain socket used for local communication with
ovsdb-server (use --db-sock to override this location).
sysconfdir/openvswitch/system-id.conf
The persistent system UUID created and read by --system-id=ran‐
dom.
sysconfdir/openvswitch/system-type.conf
sysconfdir/openvswitch/system-version.conf
The system-type and system-version values stored in the data‐
base's Open_vSwitch table when not specified as a command-line
option.
EXAMPLE
The files debian/openvswitch-switch.init and xenserver/etc_init.d_open‐
vswitch in the Open vSwitch source distribution are good examples of
how to use ovs-ctl.
SEE ALSO
README.md, INSTALL.Linux.md, ovsdb-server(8), ovs-vswitchd(8).
Open vSwitch June 2011 ovs-ctl(8)