A system, method and computer program product that is designed to support
high-availability, rapid fault recovery, out of band condition signaling
and/or other quality of service assurances and security in a networked
environment. In one aspect, a method of the invention includes the step of
providing a processing system with a dual-kernel or multi-kernel software
operating system. The operating system includes a supervisory operating
system and a secondary operating system that provides network functions to
user applications. The method also includes the step of providing a
Network Control Software (NCS) in the supervisory operating system. The
NCS is configured to transparently monitor and control network operations
in the secondary operating system.
