This course describes the FreeBSD networking stack. It is made up of a series of lectures derived from tutorials given by George Neville-Neil. Additional lectures will be developed over the next few years. Each lecture may be ordered separately and is described below.
Lecture 1: Device Drivers
This lecture describes how to write and maintain network drivers in FreeBSD. By way of example it uses the Intel Gigabit Ethernet driver (igb). The lecture covers the basic data structures and APIs necessary to implement a network driver in FreeBSD. The lecture is general enough that it can be applied to other BSDs, and likely to other embedded and UNIX like systems. It is specific enough that given a device and a manual, you should be able to develop a working driver on your own.
Lecture 2: The IPv6 Stack
All of the BSDs have had rich support for version 6 of the Internet Protocols from the very beginning of the work to specify a new set of network layer protocols for the Internet. While many references exist for engineers interested in version 4 of the IP protocols, to date, very little has been published describing the newer code. This lecture presents an in depth discussion and code walk through of version 6 of the IP protocols, describing and dissecting the paths that packets take from the driver layer up to the socket layer of the network stack. The lecture covers the four paths packets travel through the network stack: reception, transmission, forwarding, and error handling.
George Neville-Neil is a FreeBSD Committer, member of the FreeBSD Core team, and an author. He works on networking and operating system code for fun and profit. He also teaches various course on subjects related to computer programming. His professional areas of interest include code spelunking, operating systems, networking and security. He is the co-author with Marshall Kirk McKusick of The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System, and is the columnist behind ACM Queue's ``Kode Vicious.'' Mr. Neville-Neil earned his bachelor's degree in computer science at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, and is a member of the ACM, the Usenix Association and the IEEE. He is an avid bicyclist and traveler who currently resides in New York City.
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