Chapter 31. Streams

Introduction

In this chapter, we will provide an overview of the STREAMS system and the functions used by an application to access a stream. Our goal is to understand the implementation of networking protocols within the STREAMS framework. We will also develop a simple TCP client using the Transport Provider Interface (TPI), the interface into the transport layer that sockets normally use on a system based on STREAMS. Additional information on STREAMS, including information on writing kernel routines that utilize STREAMS, can be found in [Rago 1993].

  • STREAMS were designed by Dennis Ritchie [Ritchie 1984] and were first made widely available with SVR3 in 1986. The POSIX specification defines STREAMS as an option group, which means ...

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