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NAME | DESCRIPTION | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON |
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veth(4) Kernel Interfaces Manual veth(4)
veth - Virtual Ethernet Device
The veth devices are virtual Ethernet devices. They can act as
tunnels between network namespaces to create a bridge to a
physical network device in another namespace, but can also be used
as standalone network devices.
veth devices are always created in interconnected pairs. A pair
can be created using the command:
# ip link add <p1-name> type veth peer name <p2-name>
In the above, p1-name and p2-name are the names assigned to the
two connected end points.
Packets transmitted on one device in the pair are immediately
received on the other device. When either device is down, the
link state of the pair is down.
veth device pairs are useful for combining the network facilities
of the kernel together in interesting ways. A particularly
interesting use case is to place one end of a veth pair in one
network namespace and the other end in another network namespace,
thus allowing communication between network namespaces. To do
this, one can provide the netns parameter when creating the
interfaces:
# ip link add <p1-name> netns <p1-ns> type veth peer <p2-name> netns <p2-ns>
or, for an existing veth pair, move one side to the other
namespace:
# ip link set <p2-name> netns <p2-ns>
ethtool(8) can be used to find the peer of a veth network
interface, using commands something like:
# ip link add ve_A type veth peer name ve_B; # Create veth pair
# ethtool -S ve_A; # Discover interface index of peer
NIC statistics:
peer_ifindex: 16
# ip link | grep '^16:'; # Look up interface
16: ve_B@ve_A: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,M-DOWN> mtu 1500 qdisc ...
clone(2), network_namespaces(7), ip(8), ip-link(8), ip-netns(8)
This page is part of the man-pages (Linux kernel and C library
user-space interface documentation) project. Information about
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⟨https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/⟩. If you have a bug report
for this manual page, see
⟨https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git/tree/CONTRIBUTING⟩.
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⟨https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/man-pages/⟩ on
2025-08-11. If you discover any rendering problems in this HTML
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[email protected]
Linux man-pages 6.15 2025-05-17 veth(4)
Pages that refer to this page: network_namespaces(7)
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HTML rendering created 2025-09-06 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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