Inside Cisco IOS Software Architecture

Introduction

Venture into any bookstore today and you can find numerous books on internetworking covering a wide range of topics from protocols to network design techniques. There’s no question that internetworking has become a popular field with the enormous growth of the Internet and the increasing convergence of voice, video, and data. Cisco has built a very successful business selling the equipment that forms the network infrastructure—by some accounts, Cisco has more than 85 percent of the market—and at the same time has seen its Cisco IOS Software become a de facto industry standard. Yet, although plenty of material is written about network design and the protocols IOS supports, very little information is available from sources other than ...