SYNOPSIS

ovs-brcompatd [options]

DESCRIPTION

A daemon that provides a legacy bridge front-end for ovs-vswitchd. It does this by listening for bridge ioctl commands (e.g., those generated by the brctl program) to add or remove datapaths and the interfaces that attach to them.

OPTIONS

--appctl=program

Sets the name to the program that ovs-brcompatd runs to communicate with ovs-vswitchd. The default is ovs-appctl. Unless program contains /, ovs-brcompatd will search the PATH environment variable to find it.

--vsctl=program

Sets the name to the program that ovs-brcompatd runs to communicate with ovsdb-server. The default is ovs-vsctl. Unless program contains /, ovs-brcompatd will search the PATH environment variable to find it.

--pidfile[=pidfile]

Causes a file (by default, ovs-brcompatd.pid) to be created indicating the PID of the running process. If the pidfile argument is not specified, or if it does not begin with /, then it is created in /var/run/openvswitch.

If --pidfile is not specified, no pidfile is created.

--overwrite-pidfile

By default, when --pidfile is specified and the specified pidfile already exists and is locked by a running process, ovs-brcompatd refuses to start. Specify --overwrite-pidfile to cause it to instead overwrite the pidfile.

When --pidfile is not specified, this option has no effect.

--detach

Causes ovs-brcompatd to detach itself from the foreground session and run as a background process.

--monitor

Creates an additional process to monitor the ovs-brcompatd daemon. If the daemon dies due to a signal that indicates a programming error (e.g. SIGSEGV, SIGABRT), then the monitor process starts a new copy of it. If the daemon die or exits for another reason, the monitor process exits.

This option is normally used with --detach, but it also functions without it.

--no-chdir

By default, when --detach is specified, ovs-brcompatd changes its current working directory to the root directory after it detaches. Otherwise, invoking ovs-brcompatd from a carelessly chosen directory would prevent the administrator from unmounting the file system that holds that directory.

Specifying --no-chdir suppresses this behavior, preventing ovs-brcompatd from changing its current working directory. This may be useful for collecting core files, since it is common behavior to write core dumps into the current working directory and the root directory is not a good directory to use.

This option has no effect when --detach is not specified.

-vmodule[:facility[:level]], --verbose=module[:facility[:level]]

Sets the logging level for module in facility to level:

• module may be any valid module name (as displayed by the --list action on ovs-appctl(8)), or the special name ANY to set the logging levels for all modules.
• facility may be syslog, console, or file to set the levels for logging to the system log, the console, or a file respectively, or ANY to set the logging levels for both facilities. If it is omitted, facility defaults to ANY.
• Regardless of the log levels set for file, logging to a file will not take place unless --log-file is also specified (see below).
• level must be one of off, emer, err, warn, info, or dbg, designating the minimum severity of a message for it to be logged. If it is omitted, level defaults to dbg. See ovs-appctl(8) for a definition of each log level.

-v, --verbose

Sets the maximum logging verbosity level, equivalent to --verbose=ANY:ANY:dbg.

-vPATTERN:facility:pattern, --verbose=PATTERN:facility:pattern

Sets the log pattern for facility to pattern. Refer to ovs-appctl(8) for a description of the valid syntax for pattern.

--log-file[=file]

Enables logging to a file. If file is specified, then it is used as the exact name for the log file. The default log file name used if file is omitted is /var/log/openvswitch/ovs-brcompatd.log.

-h, --help

Prints a brief help message to the console.

-V, --version

Prints version information to the console.

--check-leaks=file

Logs information about memory allocation and deallocation to file, to allow for debugging memory leaks in ovs-brcompatd. This option slows down ovs-brcompatd considerably, so it should only be used when a memory leak is suspected. Use the ovs-parse-leaks script to interpret the leak file.

--leak-limit=size

Limits size of the leak file as specified by --check-leaks to size bytes. Finding leaks sometimes requires allowing the leak file to grow very large, up to 1GB. By default, files are limited to 10MB.

NOTES

ovs-brcompatd requires the brcompat_mod.ko kernel module to be loaded.