The lightweight IP (lwIP) stack is a small-footprint networking stack that reflects the key attributes of its hummingbird mascot - it's compact, lightweight and nimble. The frugal use of memory and processing resources, coupled with support of the major IP protocols, make it the ideal choice for networked eCos-based SoC designs.

The lwIP stack integrated with eCosPro has now been updated to the latest 1.4 release. This new release provides a number of new features, performance and reliability improvements over the previous release.

The key feature added in this release is support for IPv6. Given the accelerating deployment of ipv6-based networks, this ensures device compatibility with existing IPv4 as well as the expanding base of IPv6-based networks. With the exhaustion of the IPv4 address space, IPv6 is the only option if you need to support direct global addressability for all your devices, for example in a widespread sensor network. Use of IPv6 can also help to simplify device address setup and configuration. The stack is configurable to support either IPv4 or dual IPv4 and IPv6 modes of operation.

Other features incorporated into the release are support for multicasting (a prerequisite for IPv6 support), DNS and IGMP.

The updated stack has been tested and verified on a wide variety of devices and architectures in both IPv4 and dual IPv4/IPv6 mode. Ethernet device support covers virtually all eCosPro supported target architectures, processors and boards.

The eCosPro lwIP documentation has been further expanded and extended to cover the new features including IPv6.