IPv6 on Vista 64-bit

[Alan Bateman]

Valentini, Bryan-P58079 wrote:
>
>  I'm a developer building an NIO-based transport mechanism. I saw the 
> slides from JavaOne, and I am pretty excited about your work there. I 
> had a  project engineer ask me about Vista 64-bit IPv6 support. I know 
> about the outstanding Vista-IPv6 bug, but I'm not sure which platforms 
> will be fully supported and when.  Is there any official work being 
> done to get NIO-IPv6 on Vista working for JDK 5 or 6? Will we be able 
> to use the OpenJDK on Vista in the near future?
>
> Thanks for your time,
>
> Bryan Valentini
>
A good question!

As part of the completion of the socket-channel work we have added 
support for the new IPv6 stack in Windows Vista (both 32-bit and 
64-bit). This means you can create a ServerSocketChannel and accept 
connections from IPv4 or IPv6 peers, a SocketChannel can connect to IPv6 
hosts, etc. The other part to supporting the new dual stack is the 
changes to the legacy socket APIs and these changes are already in 
jdk7/OpenJDK. If you want to try it out now, and you build OpenJDK, then 
you can apply the nio2 patch, re-build, and it will work. So far we've 
found the quality of the stack to be quite good and we haven't run into 
any issues. I appreciate that most developers don't want to build from 
the source code and to that end we will have downloadable binaries very 
soon (there is a small bit of setup needed on the download site before 
that can happen but stay tuned). If you are willing to try it out and 
send feedback that would be great!

As regards jdk5 and jdk6 - we don't have any plans at this time to 
back-port the IPv6 support into the shipping releases. If there is a 
strong business case then there isn't any technical reason why these 
changes couldn't be back-ported into jdk6. One thing to say is that the 
effort to do this isn't so much on the code side but rather in the 
testing and test environments. So there is some cost and in general we 
haven't had a lot of interest in IPv6. With OpenJDK6 then another 
possibility is that someone from the community runs with this.

-Alan.