Sun gives glimpse of revised Solaris TCP/IP stack
Sun Microsystems' new Software Express program is alive and kicking with the company delivering a rewritten TCP/IP stack for Solaris that is meant to prepare customers for faster networking technology.
The new TCP/IP stack - code-named Fire Engine - has 10 gigabit and 100 gigabit Ethernet networks in mind. Instead of using a "brute force algorithm" to move packets around, Sun has a new packet classification engine to "shunt packets off to special routines that can deal more effectively with that specific kind of packet be it UDP, TCP or IP," said Bill Moffitt, marketing manager for Solaris.
This is early access, not terribly useful technology as of yet to be sure, but it's interesting for a couple of reasons.
First off, it's the first public code dump Sun has made as part of the Software Express program. Sun launched Software Express last month to give users an early peek into upcoming Sun code. So far, Sun is only offering up early looks into the future version of Solaris, but it plans to extend the beta-style effort to its entire software line.
