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 use one of our pre-built
virtual machine images from:

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

If you are Linux-savvy and wish to take on the challenge 
of installing Mininet and its dependencies from scratch, 
the requirements are described below.

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, we recommend using one of
our pre-built virtual machine images (see above.)

Mininet installation requirements:

1. Core Mininet installation

  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. 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 work (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 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
    
3. 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):

  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 mininet/util/openflow-patches/controller.patch.
  
4. 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.
  
5. 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!