Networking Stack

Goals

modern TCP/IP capability
modular protocol evolution
low latency and good multicore throughput
clean socket semantics for native and compatibility applications

Stack structure

Kernel responsibilities

packet ingress or egress primitives
network buffer management fast path
interface event delivery
low-level filtering hooks

User-space or service responsibilities

control plane
configuration management
policy enforcement
advanced routing
firewall management
network namespaces or tenant policies in future phases

Protocol roadmap

Early support

Ethernet
IPv4
IPv6
ARP or neighbor discovery
ICMP
UDP
TCP

Later support

TLS acceleration hooks
QUIC-friendly interfaces
virtual switching
container networking

Socket model

The native socket layer should be expressive enough to support:

POSIX-like compatibility
Windows socket compatibility through subsystem translation
event-driven high-performance servers

Current runtime prototype status

vibeos_socket_create, vibeos_socket_bind, vibeos_socket_send, and vibeos_socket_close are available in the host test runtime.
vibeos_socket_bind_secure enforces policy-gated bind authorization using security-token capabilities (net_bind_required_capability_bit).
Policy capability updates are now runtime-configurable through syscall control paths (POLICY_CAPABILITY_SET for kernel callers).
receive-side simulation (vibeos_socket_receive) and aggregate runtime socket statistics are available for observability tests.
runtime bind path rejects port collisions across active sockets.

Performance direction

per-CPU queues
RSS-friendly receive flow steering
zero-copy or reduced-copy buffers where safe
future support for polling rings or submission queues if justified

Security

namespace-aware network access
brokered raw socket access
firewall and policy hooks
sandbox integration for compatibility runtimes