Networking Features

The following networking enhancements are new in the Solaris 10 1/06 release. To view networking features that are new in the previous Solaris 10 3/05 release, see Networking Enhancements.

Source-Filtered Multicasting

This enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 6/05 release and in the Solaris 10 1/06 release.

Enhancements have been made to the Multicast Listener Discovery (MLD) protocol, for IPv6, and the Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP), for IPv4. The Solaris implementation of these protocols has been enhanced to support MLDv2 and IGMPv3. These extensions provide support for source address filtering on multicast traffic. Also included is support for IETF-specified socket extensions. This support enables applications to take advantage of source-filtered multicasting.

For further information, see the Programming Interfaces Guide and the System Administration Guide: IP Services.

Enhancements for bge and xge Network Interfaces

This enhancement is new in the Solaris Express 6/05 release and in the Solaris 10 1/06 release.

The Solaris OS now contains features that extend the configuration possibilities for the bge and xge network interfaces. System administrators can now group these interfaces into LACP-capable link aggregations. These aggregations can support large-scale high availability or database implementations. In addition, you can configure xge and bge interfaces into virtual local area networks (VLANs) to extend network capability.

The new dladm command has been added for configuring and administering bge and xge interfaces. For further information, refer to the dladm(1M) man page.