dale@lamont.ldgo.columbia.edu (dale chayes) (03/28/91)
In article <93971@sgi.sgi.com>, vjs@rhyolite.wpd.sgi.com (Vernon Schryver) writes: > > > > for information on communicating across the network from within a program. > > ... > > You should also look at the Streams mechanism if you are starting from > > scratch, it might be appropriate to use the "modern" methods. > > > Well, STREAMS won't help much with Silicon Graphics TCP/IP since IRIX is > currently and in the forthcoming release firmly socketed. ...lines deleted.... I guess that I don't understand Vern's comment about not helping much under IRIX. What I said was "...have a look at this other mechanism too, as it MIGHT be appropriate....". I also put modern in quotes (to imply that I'm not convinced either.) The reason I mentioned Streams at all was because, while checking through my SGI manuals, I FOUND THE STREAMS Primer and STREAMS Programmer's Guide. Trivial further investigation produces man pages for clone() and streamio(7) on my system. From this (admittedly weak) evidence, I _assume_ that Streams is supported. I had a look at the eoe2 tape to see if there was a optional module that has to be installed, but found nothing that looked remotely like streams. So, is Streams there or not? (in 3.3xx) Dale-- Dale Chayes Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory of Columbia University Route 9W, Palisades, N.Y. 10964 dale@lamont.ldgo.columbia.edu voice: (914) 359-2900 extension 434 fax: (914) 359-6817
vjs@rhyolite.wpd.sgi.com (Vernon Schryver) (03/29/91)
In article <3542@lamont.ldgo.columbia.edu>, dale@lamont.ldgo.columbia.edu (dale chayes) writes: > > > > Well, STREAMS won't help much with Silicon Graphics TCP/IP since IRIX is > > currently and in the forthcoming release firmly socketed. > ... > So, is Streams there or not? (in 3.3xx) Silicon Graphics has been shipping SVR3 STREAMS for a long time. I think they were in 2.5/3.5, and I know they were in 3.6 (for the IRIS 3000 series). I put them in for reasons of varying validity, including the notion that it was the easiest way to implement PTY's, and the fact that the STREAMS tty's on the 3000 were 12 times faster than the SVR0 clists. As far as I know, we were shipping STREAMS TTY's before anyone else, including AT&T and the solar guys. This is nothing to brag about, because the hacks I came up with to make STREAMS tty's pass SVID are amazingly close to the independently invented solar hacks, but they are not identical. Our line discipline module is also amazingly similar on the outside, but also not identical. Someday we may take the SVR4 punishment for being early. We only changed the SVR3 STREAMS head and utility code to work in our symmetric-MP kernel, to pass the AT&T SVID, and to work in a lot of places where AT&T thought "x->foo |= bit" is a non-interruptable operation on all hardware. One of the reasons for doing STREAMS ttys was to help decide how to get good TCP/IP. Ultimately, we chose to do a straight 4.3BSD to SVR3 shoehorn. This means we have STREAMS for tty's and for any drivers customers or third parties write, but we have sockets for networking. Thus, if you want TCP on an IRIS, you're stuck with sockets, for at least the next release or so. It could be worse; check the ttcp performance numbers on localhost when you get 4.0. Vernon Schryver, vjs@sgi.com