TIL - Virtual CAN interfaces
TIL, Today I Learned, is more of a "I just figured this out: here are my notes, you may find them useful too" rather than a full blog post
There are many scenarios where a virtual Controller Area Network(CAN) interface could be handy. It let you develop and test applications that without an actual physical CAN bus.
My scenario is to play around with Berkley Packet Filter(BPF) [1] and do some data manipulation on recieved CAN frames in kernel space.
Setup
We use iproute2 [2] in order to create the virtual CAN interfaces
sudo ip link add dev vcan0 type vcan sudo ip link add dev vcan1 type vcan
Bring up the interaces
sudo ip link set up vcan0 sudo ip link set up vcan1
You are now able to use can-utils [3] to send and recieve CAN frames.
Routing
If you have enabled the CONFIG_CAN_GW in your kernel, then you can create gateway rules and route frames between CAN interfaces cangw (part of can-utils).
Verify that CAN_GW is supported by the kernel
[16:25:10]marcus@goliat:~/git/linux$ zgrep CONFIG_CAN_GW /proc/config.gz CONFIG_CAN_GW=m
Load kernel module
sudo modprobe can-gw
Create gateway rule to route messages from vcan0 to vcan1 and vice versa
sudo cangw -A -s vcan0 -d vcan1 -e sudo cangw -A -s vcan1 -d vcan0 -e
The routing is not limited to only virtual CAN interfaces. You can setup gateway rules between real and virtual ones.