Major Milestones
| Year | Major development and availability milestones |
|---|---|
| 1996 | Alpha quality IPv6 support in Linux kernel development version 2.1.8. |
| 6bone (an IPv6 virtual network for testing) is started. | |
| 1997 | By the end of 1997 IBM's AIX 4.3 is the first commercial platform supporting IPv6. |
| Also in 1997, Early Adopter Kits for DEC's operating systems, Tru64 and OpenVMS, are made available. | |
| 1998 | Microsoft Research releases its first experimental IPv6 stack. This support is not intended for use in a production environment. |
| 1999 | In February, the IPv6 Forum is founded by the IETF Deployment WG to drive deployment worldwide. This results in the creation of regional and local IPv6 Task Forces. |
| 2000 | Production-quality BSD support for IPv6 becomes generally available in early to mid-2000 in FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD via the KAME project. |
| Microsoft releases an IPv6 technology preview version for Windows 2000 in March 2000. | |
| Sun Solaris supports IPv6 in Solaris 8 in February. | |
| Compaq ships IPv6 with Tru64. | |
| 2001 | In January, Compaq ships IPv6 with OpenVMS. |
| Cisco Systems introduces IPv6 support on Cisco IOS routers and L3 switches. | |
| HP introduces IPv6 with HP-UX 11i v1. | |
| On April 23, 2001, the European Commission launches the European IPv6 Task Force | |
| 2002 | Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 SP1 have limited IPv6 support for research and testing since at least 2002. |
| Microsoft Windows XP (2001) supports IPv6 for developmental purposes. In Windows XP SP1 (2002) and Windows Server 2003, IPv6 is included as a core networking technology, suitable for commercial deployment. | |
| IBM z/OS supports IPv6 since version 1.4 (general availability in September 2002). | |
| 2003 | Apple Mac OS X v10.3 "Panther" (2003) supports IPv6 which is enabled by default. |
| 2004 | In July, ICANN announces that IPv6 address records for the Japan (jp) and Korea (kr) country code top-level domain nameservers are visible in the DNS root server zone files with serial number 2004072000. The IPv6 records for France (fr) are added later. This makes IPv6 DNS publicly operational. |
| 2005 | Linux 2.6.12 removes experimental status from its IPv6 implementation. |
| 2007 | Microsoft Windows Vista (2007) supports IPv6 which is enabled by default. |
| Apple's AirPort Extreme 802.11n base station includes an IPv6 gateway in its default configuration. It uses 6to4 tunneling and manually configured static tunnels. (Note: 6to4 was disabled by default in later firmware revisions.) | |
| 2008 | On February 4, 2008, IANA adds AAAA records for the IPv6 addresses of six root name servers. With this transition, it is now possible to resolve domain names using only IPv6. |
| On March 12, 2008, IETF does an hour long IPv4 blackout at its meeting as an opportunity to capture informal experience data to inform protocol design work going forward; this led to many fixes in operating systems and applications. | |
| On May 27, 2008, the European Commission publish their Action Plan for the deployment of Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) in Europe, with the aim of making IPv6 available to 25% of European users by 2010. | |
| 2011 | On June 8, 2011 the Internet Society together with several other big companies and organizations held World IPv6 Day, a global 24 hour test of IPv6. |
| 2012 | On June 6, 2012 the Internet Society together with many other big companies and organizations held World IPv6 Launch Day, a global permanent deployment of IPv6. |
Read more about this topic: IPv6 Deployment
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