People familiar with xfce from other distributions might know the handy wavelan plugin for the panel. Unfortunately due to dom0's nature of being networkless, for obvious security reasons, i quickly hacked a script together to have at least some kind of current network usage. I'm sure it can be further optimized or customized to be more fancier, but that's something for you to implement 🙂

Note: This script runs in dom0. You should be aware of the impact. This CAN and WILL be a security issue. This script is NOT free of bugs.

#!/bin/bash

INTERFACE='wls6f0u3'
VMNAME='sys-net'

INTERVAL=3 # seconds

COMMAND="cat /sys/class/net/$INTERFACE/statistics/rx_bytes;cat /sys/class/net/$INTERFACE/statistics/tx_bytes;sleep $INTERVAL;cat /sys/class/net/$INTERFACE/statistics/rx_bytes;cat /sys/class/net/$INTERFACE/statistics/tx_bytes"
SHMFILE='/dev/shm/netspeed'

# read values
if [ -z "$1" ]; then

    if [ ! -e "$SHMFILE" ];then

        (setsid "$0" daemon &amp;) &amp;

    else
        cat "$SHMFILE"

    fi
    exit 0
fi

# daemon: calculate values in infinite loop

if [ -e "$SHMFILE" ];then
    # possible race condition, another daemon already running
    exit 0

fi


cd /
umask 177 # u+rw,g-rwx,o-rwx
touch "$SHMFILE"


for fd in $(ls /proc/$$/fd); do
    eval "exec $fd&gt;&amp;-"
done
exec 0&lt; /dev/null #  stdin
exec &gt; /dev/null # stdout
exec 2&gt; /dev/null # stderr

while true; do 
    r=`qvm-run --no-autostart --pass-io --no-gui --no-colour-output --no-colour-stderr "$VMNAME" "$COMMAND"`

    a=($r)
    r1=${a[0]}
    t1=${a[1]}
    r2=${a[2]}
    t2=${a[3]}
    rkbps=`awk "BEGIN {printf \"%d\", ($r2 - $r1) / 1024 * (1 / $INTERVAL)}"`

        tkbps=`awk "BEGIN {printf \"%d\", ($t2 - $t1) / 1024 * (1 / $INTERVAL)}"`


    echo -n "&lt;txt&gt;<span> $rkbps kb/s / $tkbps kb/s </span>&lt;/txt&gt;" &gt; "$SHMFILE"

done