Chapter 18. The Solaris Network Stack

Contributed by Sunay Tripathi

Network hardware and software have been an integral part of Sun technology from the very beginning, going back to 1982 when Sun introduced the Sun-1 workstation running Sun's earliest implementation of SunOS. The Sun-1 operating system included a built-in Ethernet port and a fully functional TCP/IP software stack. In the 24 years since the Sun-1 workstation, work has continued on network hardware and software, keeping pace with the industry and the increasing demands of network-centric applications and workloads.

Several years ago, the blueprints for a new network software architecture began to take shape, designed to address the changing dynamics of network-centric computing and to leverage the technology of the hardware platforms (network cards, I/O buses, multiprocessors, etc.) running volume applications and services.

Solaris 10 incorporates several significant changes in the network software stack. In this chapter, we look at the implementation in earlier Solaris releases and describe the new software stack in Solaris 10.