Open vSwitch is a production quality, multilayer virtual switch licensed
under the open source Apache 2.0 license.  It is designed to enable
massive network automation through programmatic extension, while still
supporting standard management interfaces (e.g. NetFlow, sFlow, RSPAN,
ERSPAN,  CLI).  In addition, it is designed to support distribution
across multiple physical servers similar to VMware.s vNetwork distributed
vswitch or Cisco.s Nexus 1000V.

Open vSwitch can operate both as a soft switch running within the
hypervisor, and as the control stack for switching silicon. It has been
ported to multiple virtualization platforms and switching chipsets. It
is the default switch in the Xen Cloud Platform and also supports Xen,
XenServer, KVM, and VirtualBox. The bulk of the code is written in
platform-independent C and is easily ported to other environments.

This package will build kernel modules that will be used as replacements
for the bridge modules included with the stock Linux kernel.  Open
vSwitch also includes a kernel module for backwards compatibility if you wish
to use the standard Linux bridge utils to manage it.