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Network Stack Cloning / Virtualization Extensions

Posted by timothy on from the your-virtual-empire dept.

HellRazr writes "From the FreeBSD hackers mailing list: 'at http://www.tel.fer.hr/zec/vimage/ you can find a set of patches against 4.8-RELEASE kernel that provide support for network stack cloning. The patched kernel allows multiple fully independent network stack instances to simultaneously coexist within a single OS kernel, providing a foundation for supporting diverse new applications.' We can sure have fun with this..."

1 of 44 comments (clear)

  1. That's how it worked originally in UNIX by Animats · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Before BSD, before Bill Joy, there was 3COM's UNET TCP/IP package for UNIX, written by Greg Shaw. Originally, it had a rather weak implementation of TCP, but I fixed that and added ICMP and UDP support. We ran this at Ford Aerospace from 1981 until about 1985. It ran on PDP/11 machines, the original VAX 11/780, and the Z8000. (Our pair of Z8000 machines may have been the first single-chip microprocessors on the Internet.)

    UNET ran almost entirely in user space. All that went into the kernel were device drivers for the network devices and a psuedo-device to allow interprocess communication to the network process. This made modification and debugging much easier. You could kill and restart the network process without rebooting the system.

    Twenty years later, someone has reinvented this approach.