Advice requested: Porting Linux TCP/IP stack to application space

Hello! This is my first posting to this group. If this is the wrong
place to post please let me know.

For ongoing product testing purposes, my company needs a TCP/IP stack
that supports pretty much the same RFCs as the Linux stack.
Converting lwIP was easy, of course, but that stack doesn't give us
what we need. We mainly converted it to get ourselves started & prove
the test environment we're building will work.

Now, we're thinking we want to convert the Linux stack itself to work
in application space. We have an API that abstracts OS specific
functions, such as threading, semaphores, etc. The challenge is to
pull out the Linux TCP/IP stack code & get it to use our OS API. If
successful, the "converted" stack would run in application space on
any platform (not just Linux).

Our current problem is we have nobody in-house who's familiar w/ Linux
at this level. We're going to have to either hire someone or
outsource the work, but we need to get a general idea of how difficult
this would be or if it's even feasible.

Any thoughts/advice are greatly appreciated. I can't contribute much
general stuff to the group in return since I personally have limited
Linux experience at this level, but in return I will share the success
of our port w/ the group.

rt

PS: We have someone working on an estimate for this project now, but
they also have no experience w/ Linux at this level. The more we can
learn up front, the better!