Starlan,tcp/ip streams/sockets on 7300?

~XT4103000~Marc Mengel~C25~G25~6184~ mmengel at cuuxb.ATT.COM
Fri May 20 00:08:48 AEST 1988


In article <365 at icus.UUCP> lenny at icus.UUCP (Lenny Tropiano) writes:
>In article <2090 at rtech.UUCP> daveb at rtecn.UUCP writes:
>|>
>|>I am looking for some way to get SVR3ish STREAMS or sockets on my 7300. 
>|>I had heard that either the Starlan software or the TCP/IP software in
>|>fact included one or the other beneath the covers, and I'd be willing to
>|>pay real money for one of them if this were true.
>|>
>...
>You've brought up a very interesting point.  Can someone just buy the
>software that puts the "hooks" in the operating system to provide sockets,
>STREAMS, and RFS?   It seems like the /usr/include/sys/errno.h file has
>the errors already there to support the function calls.

Well, yes and no.  What Starlan has in it is a pre-SysVr3.0 version of 
streams (known as "B+" streams) which is used mainly inside the driver.
The interface to streams is not the standard system call interface, but
is actually done via ioctl() calls to the starlan driver.

TCP/IP for the 7300 does not use streams, rather the Wollongong 
implementation of BSD sockets, similarly done through ioctl() calls to 
the driver.

The /usr/include/sys/*.h files have BSD-isms in them for two reasons,
one to support Wollongong TCP/IP, and two because large portions of the 
Unix PC kernel are BSD 4.0 derived (the paging system, for example is 
purest BSD); however only the barest semblance of the Berkeley 
extensions remain in the code.

So, in summary, you can get a reasonable semblance of streams with
Starlan software, and a reasonable semblance of sockets with the
TCP software (although adding your own streams modules to the Starlan
software would be a challenging proposition, to say the least...)

>-Lenny
-- 
 Marc Mengel	

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