SUMMARY: 2.5 vs 2.6: streams vs sockets

From: Rich Casto (rich@rcon.com)
Date: Thu Nov 06 1997 - 12:11:58 CST


ORIGINAL QUESTION:

My original question was regarding the veracity of a post to the
Firewall-1 mailing list (shown edited here):

------- start of forwarded message -------
I dont know if everone know this. Solaris 2.5 uses streams to talk to the
network. They changed that in 2.6., Solaris 2.6 uses sockets. They went
back to the BSD standard. Just a small change (yea right). They really
didnt tell anyone about that.
------- end -------

THE ANSWERS:

The answers came quickly (as always) and all said basically the same
thing, so I'll just repeat what I think is the best one which was one
person quoting another person who quoted Casper Dik:

--------
There's apparently a number of people confusing the kernel interface
with the underlying transport mechanisms.

Simply put, the TCP/IP situation is like this:

Os API Kernel interface Kernel impl.

*BSD* sockets sockets mbufs
Solaris <=2.5.1 sockets/TLI STREAMs w/ sockmod/timod STREAMs
Solaris 2.6 sockets/TLI sockets/ & STREAMS/timod STREAMs

So all that has changed is the libsocket<->kernel interface.

(While there were lots of changes to the underlying STREAMs implementation
as well, the model of the implementation wasn't changed)
--------

This change isn't a problem if your application is dynamically linked,
but since some security applications are statically linked, this might
have an effect.

THANKS:

Thanks go to (in order received):

Frank Cusack <frank@fore.com>
poffen@San-Jose.ate.slb.com (Russ Poffenberger)
ibmgsuxwg-S.KAPUR(AG0224)XXXX <shobhit@mtcts1.mt.lucent.com>
Joel Lee <jlee@thomas.com>
Ian TCollins <itc1@scigen.co.uk>
Casper Dik <casper@holland.Sun.com>
K.Ravi <RAVKRISH.IN.oracle.com.ofcmail@in.oracle.com>

Rich

-- 
R  I  C  H  A  R  D     C  A  S  T  O  __________________
radical consulting, inc. / belle mead, nj / rich@rcon.com



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