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VMCI(4) BSD Kernel Interfaces Manual VMCI(4) NAME vmci -- VMware Virtual Machine Communication Interface SYNOPSIS To compile this driver into the kernel, place the following line in your kernel configuration file: device vmci Alternatively, to load the driver as a module at boot time, place the following line in loader.conf(5): if_vmci_load="YES" DESCRIPTION The vmci driver provides support for the VMware Virtual Machine Communi- cation Interface (VMCI) in virtual machines by VMware. VMCI allows virtual machines to communicate with host kernel modules and the VMware hypervisors. User level applications in a virtual machine can use VMCI through vSockets (also known as VMCI Sockets and not included in this kernel module), a socket address family designed to be compatible with UDP and TCP at the interface level. Today, VMCI and vSockets are used by various VMware Tools components inside the guest for zero-config, network-less access to VMware host services. In addition to this, VMware's users are using vSockets for various applications, where network access of the virtual machine is restricted or non-existent. Examples of this are VMs communicating with device proxies for proprietary hardware running as host applications and automated testing of applications run- ning within virtual machines. In a virtual machine, VMCI is exposed as a regular PCI device. The pri- mary communication mechanisms supported are a point-to-point bidirec- tional transport based on a pair of memory-mapped queues, and asynchro- nous notifications in the form of datagrams and doorbells. These fea- tures are available to kernel level components such as vSockets through the VMCI kernel API. In addition to this, the VMCI kernel API provides support for receiving events related to the state of the VMCI communica- tion channels, and the virtual machine itself. SEE ALSO socket(2), pci(9) VMware vSockets Documentation, https://www.vmware.com/support/developer/vmci-sdk/. HISTORY The vmci driver first appeared in FreeBSD 12.0. AUTHORS The vmci driver and man page were written by Vishnu Dasa <vdasahar@gmail.com>. BSD February 10, 2018 BSD
NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | SEE ALSO | HISTORY | AUTHORS
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