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TCP/IP Networking in Windows Vista
Wednesday, May 24th, 2006
This article examines the various enhancements made to the TCP/IP stack in Windows Vista 
and how they provide improved reliability and performance over previous Windows platforms.
The Windows TCP/IP stack was significantly beefed up in Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP, and in service packs for these platforms, to include selective acknowledgements, TCP receive window scaling, dead gateway detection, and other tweaks that made it perform better and more reliably than Windows 2000’s stack performed. But under the hood, Windows Server 2003’s stack was still pretty much the same old stack developed in the early 90s for the Windows NT platform. In other words, it was a stack originally designed to support only IPv4. And when Microsoft in the mid 90s saw the growing need for their platform to support IPv6 as well as IPv4, support for IPv6 was simply tacked on by adding a second transport layer driver Tcpip6.sys to the existing Tcpip.sys driver for IPv4. This resulted in a "dual stack" where transport for IPv4 and IPv6 were handled by separate drivers, and to enable IPv6, support administrators had to install the IPv6 protocol component on their Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 machines.
The dual stack approach also had other disadvantages. For example, it separated packet filtering functionality for each IP protocol, making it harder to configure firewalls on machines running both protocols. It also made life more difficult for developers of network applications that needed to support both IPv4 and IPv6. And it meant duplication of code and a less efficient pipeline for stack processing. TCP/IP Networking in Windows Vista
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