Recently, developers added the pseudo-device vether(4). Such virtual switch ports can be member of bridges. An additional pseudo-device 'vwire' would come in handy to interconnect two or more switches in a virtualized environment, without necessarily bridging to a physical switch port as well. In addition to providing a simple virtual wire, such a 'vwire' pseudo-device offers certain properties, such as delay, loss, jitter, MTU size, etc. Over time, 'vwire' could evolve to a digital "channel simulator" or even a "link emulator", similar to 'dummynet' for example which was/is used by m0n0wall and pfSense (primarily to implement traffic shaping/policing though).
The description http://open-mesh.net/wiki/Emulation comes very close to what I am trying to setup on my OpenBSD laptop as a physical OpenBSD host, in order to emulate a network with several virtual OpenBSD machines as guests using qemu (e.g. a bunch of P, PE and CE routers of a MPLS network that uses lossy wireless links). Are you aware of anyone who may already work on an equivalent of 'wire_filter' and/or 'dummynet' in OpenBSD which connect bridges over virtual wires? Or do you have recommendations which existing pseudo-device(s) I should study first to get me started in the right direction with 'vwire'? Thank you, Rolf
