OpenJDK Networking Development

The source code for the networking part of the the core libraries is spread over a few hundreds files making for a total of, approximately, 70,000 lines of code. 50,000 of these are java code, while the rest is native (i.e. C) code. While this is not massive, due to the tricky nature of cross-platform support, some guidance is needed before you take upon the the task of tinkering with that beast.