International Business Machines Corporation

Gregory Scott Joyce

Lance Warren Russell

Saurabh Desai

Kyusun Chang

Paul David Mazzurana

Jessie Ann Haug

Larry Steven Wise

Lon E Hall

An information handling system includes a number of stations connected in a network configuration, each station including a processor, a storage and an I/O controller, where the processor operates under control of an operating system control program which is divided into a user (application) space and a kernel (system) space, the kernel may include a protocol layer interfacing the user application to a DLPI in the kernel, a DLPI which interfaces between the protocol module and a device driver interface, a device driver and a hardware device for connecting the station to the network. When data is to be received by a station from the network, the following steps are performed in the DLPI: recognize the network interface type (FDDI, Ethernet, Token Ring, etc.); recognize the protocol being used; format data according to the protocol; transmit to a Data Link Services user if address resolution is not required; if address resolution is required, test to determine if the protocol address resolution routine is registered; if registered, transmit data to the Data Link Services user; if not registered, call the default address resolution routine to resolve address and then transmit data to protocol module. When data is to be transmitted from a station to the network, the following steps are performed in the DLPI: recognize the network interface type (FDDI, Ethernet, Token Ring, etc.); recognize the protocol being used; test for registered address resolution routine; if not registered, call the default address resolution routine; if registered, call the registered address resolution routine; and call the device driver to, output the data to be transmitted to the network.

System for user registering an address resolution routine to provide

A common data link interface providing a framework for device drivers and data link providers. This interface allows multiple frameworks to coexist and share a single device driver. The common data link interface is framework independant and provides functions that are common to a plurality of frameworks. The common data link interface comprises three components, a network device driver, network demultiplexers, and network services. The network device driver provides a simple interface to network based devices that can be used by both the sockets IFNET and the streams DLPI data link layers. The network demultiplexor provides common data link receive functionality. Network services provides the remaining additional functionality required to bind the common data link interface together.

System for forwarding data packets with different formats to different

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Austin, TX, United States of America

Gregory Scott Joyce