We present MoonGen, a flexible high-speed packet generator. It can saturate 10 GbE links with minimum-sized packets while using only a single CPU core by running on top of the packet processing framework DPDK. Linear multi-core scaling allows for even higher rates: We have tested MoonGen with up to 178.5 Mpps at 120 Gbit/s. Moving the whole packet generation logic into user-controlled Lua scripts allows us to achieve the highest possible flexibility. In addition, we utilize hardware features of commodity NICs that have not been used for packet generators previously. A key feature is the measurement of latency with sub-microsecond precision and accuracy by using hardware timestamping capabilities of modern commodity NICs. We address timing issues with software-based packet generators and apply methods to mitigate them with both hardware support and with a novel method to control the inter-packet gap in software. Features that were previously only possible with hardware-based solutions are now provided by MoonGen on commodity hardware. MoonGen is available as free software under the MIT license in our git repository at https: //github.com/emmericp/MoonGen.
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