Skip to main content
Run it with no arguments. That’s the whole trick.
A four-step wizard opens: pick an interface, pick a traffic pattern, fill in the settings, press enter. You can leave every field at its default and still get a sensible, safe run.
The defaults are deliberately cautious: 100 kpps, not line rate, and 30 seconds. An accidental run neither saturates a link nor runs forever.

​
No spare interface? Use a veth pair

You don’t need two servers to try this. A veth pair and a network namespace give you a sender and a receiver on one machine, and nothing you do can touch your real network.
Now send across it:
And when you’re done, sudo ip netns del wblab removes the whole thing. The namespace lab guide builds this out into a full sender and receiver, with the exact numbers to expect.

​
The first attach takes a few seconds

On a physical NIC, the first thing you’ll see is this:
It looks broken. It isn’t. Attaching a native XDP program makes the driver reinitialise its queues, which drops carrier while the link renegotiates. On a 10G Intel NIC that’s typically 8 to 11 seconds. Two things soften it. The run clock doesn’t start until the link is back, so a 30-second run gives you 30 seconds of traffic. And it only happens once: the XDP program stays attached, so pressing r to run again restarts in about two seconds. Virtual interfaces like veth skip this entirely.

​
Watching it run

The dashboard updates four times a second. Rates sit at the top of each column because they’re what you actually watch. Totals sit below. When the run finishes you get a summary and a menu: r to run it again, e to edit settings, p to change pattern, q to quit. Wireblast also remembers what you ran, so the next sudo wireblast starts prefilled.

​
The same run, as one command

Everything in the wizard is a flag:
Add --start to skip the wizard but keep the dashboard, or --no-tui to skip both and print plain text for a script:
Two bit rates, both correct, measuring different things. Reading the numbers explains which one you want.

​
Next

Common tasks

Benchmark a link, run IMIX, replay a capture, stress a firewall.

Two-box test

Sender on one machine, receiver on the other, and how to tell they agree.

Receiving traffic

Wireblast transmits only by default. Here’s how to turn receiving on safely.

Every flag

The complete command-line reference.