mininet/INSTALL

Preliminary Mininet Installation/Configuration Notes

Alpha release, March 2010

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(Disclaimer: this is an early alpha release; things may be broken!)

The easiest way to get Mininet running is to start with one of our pre-built virtual machine images from:

http://www.openflowswitch.org/foswiki/bin/view/OpenFlow/MininetGettingStarted

Once you have booted up the VM image, all you need to do to install
Mininet into it is:

 git clone git://yuba.stanford.edu/mininet.git
 cd mininet
 sudo make install

At this point, it should be possible to run a simple Mininet configuration
from the command line:

 sudo mn

As an alternative, if you are Linux-savvy, do not wish to use the VM
image, and wish to take on the challenge of installing Mininet and its
dependencies from scratch, the requirements are described below.

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Mininet Manual Installation Notes

These installation notes assume you understand how to do things like
compile kernels, apply patches, configure networks, write code, etc.. If
this is unfamiliar territory, or if you run into trouble, we recommend
using one of our pre-built virtual machine images (see above.)

1. Core Mininet installation

  The core Mininet installation requires gcc, make, python,
  and setuptools.

  To install Mininet itself, with root privileges:

  # make install

  This places the mininet package in /usr/lib/python-2.5/site-packages/,
  so that 'import mininet' will work, and installs the primary mn
  script (mn) as well as its helper utility (mnexec.)

2. Script-based kernel and OpenFlow installation for Debian

  If you are running debian-stable, you may be able to use the
  util/install.sh script to install a compatible Linux kernel as well as
  other software including the OpenFlow reference implementation, the Open
  vSwitch switch implementation, and the NOX OpenFlow controller. Assuming
  the mininet source tree is installed in ~/mininet, the steps to run
  install.sh are as follows:

  % cd
  % time ~/mininet/util/install.sh
  % sudo reboot  # to load new kernel
  % ~/mininet/util/install.sh -c  # to clean out unneeded kernel stuff

  If install.sh cannot be used for some reason, the kernel and
  OpenFlow software requirements are descibed in steps [3] and [4],
  which follow.

  If you successfully used install.sh, proceed to step [5].

3. Linux Kernel requirements

  Mininet requires a kernel built with network namespace support enabled,
  i.e. with CONFIG_NET_NS=Y
  
  If your kernel doesn't support it, you will need to build and install a 
  kernel that does! >= 2.6.33 works better, but may be harder to get
  working, depending on your Linux distribution.
  
  A script for building Debian packages for 2.6.33.1 is provided in
  mininet/util/kbuild. You may wish to read it, as it applies patches
  to enable 2.6.33.1 to build under debian-stable, and to enable the
  tun driver to work correctly with Mininet.
    
  Earlier kernels (e.g. 2.6.29) work with CONFIG_NET_NS enabled and no
  additional patches, but are much slower at removing veth interfaces,
  resulting in much slower switch shutdown.

  For scalable configurations, you might need to increase some of your
  kernel limits. Sample params are in util/sysctl_addon, which can be
  appended to /etc/sysctl.conf (and modified as necessary for your
  desired configuration):

    sudo su -c "cat sysctl_addon >> /etc/sysctl.conf"

  To save the config change, run:

    sudo sysctl -p
    
4. OpenFlow software and configuration requirements

  Mininet requires either the reference OpenFlow switch implementation
  (from openflowswitch.org) or Open vSwitch (openvswitch.org) to be
  installed. "make test" requires the reference user and kernel space
  implementations as well as Open vSwitch. Note the kernel implementation
  is not currently included in OpenFlow 1.0.

  To switch to the most recent OpenFlow 0.8.9 release branch (the most
  recent one with full NOX support and kernel datapath support) in your
  OpenFlow git tree:

   git checkout -b release/0.8.9 remotes/origin/release/0.8.9
  
  A patch to enable datapath.c to compile with recent kernels
  is included in util/openflow-patches/datapath.patch.
  
  Mininet will automatically load and remove kernel module dependencies
  for supported switch types, using modprobe and rmmod - but these
  modules must be in a location where modprobe can find them (i.e.
  /lib/modules/...)

  The reference OpenFlow controller (controller(8)) only supports 16
  switches by default! If you wish to run a network with more than 16
  switches, please recompile controller(8) with larger limits, or use a
  different controller such as nox. A patch to controller(8) is included
  as util/openflow-patches/controller.patch.
  
5. Other software dependencies

  To run the iperf test, you need to install iperf:

    sudo aptitude/yum install iperf

  We assume you already have ping installed. ;-)
  
  To use xterm or sshd with Mininet, you need the following:

    sudo aptitude/yum install sshd xterm screen
    
  Some examples may have additional requirements - consult the specific
  example file for details.
  
6. Other notes and recommendations

  Mininet should be run either on a machine with
  no other important processes, or on a virtual machine (recommended!)
  
  Multiple concurrent Mininet instances are not supported!

Good luck!

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