Streams Development Environment (98593)
This article was previously published under Q98593
SUMMARY
Streams is a development environment for network transports found in
recent versions of the UNIX operating system and a few other
platforms, including Windows NT. It functions as would a set of APIs
for developing or rapidly porting a network transport written in C,
although it actually is privileged driver code talking to the UNIX
kernel or, in the case of Windows NT, to various executive components.
Streams on Windows NT is implemented as a kernel-level DLL.
MORE INFORMATION
In Windows NT, the Streams environment has been enhanced to help deal
with multiprocessing issues such as the synchronization of
driver-level resources, which can be very complex in an SMP system.
The NT extensions are based on and compatible with Streams extensions
done by Sequent for their SMP version of UNIX (Dynix).
Streams is commonly but inaccurately thought of as an interprocess
communication method such as sockets. This is not so: Streams has
nothing to do with the behavior of a network transport at the
application layer or on the wire. A transport implemented in the
Streams environment behaves like any other transport, and neither
applications on a given system nor networking code on other systems
can tell the transport is Streams-based.
Streams is useful mostly to people who implement network protocol
stacks because it allows them to port their code from one platform to
another much more efficiently than would otherwise be possible.
| Modification Type: |
Major |
Last Reviewed: |
7/30/2001 |
| Keywords: |
KB98593 |
|