The STREAMS non-inclusion in Linux

[Shlomi Fish]

On Wednesday 20 Apr 2011 08:32:29 geoffrey mendelson wrote:
> On Apr 20, 2011, at 8:09 AM, Omer Zak wrote:
> > None of them has details about the reasons, which led Linux Kernel
> > developers to reject STREAMS.  STREAMS was only vaguely described as
> > poorly-designed and resource-consuming.
> 
> There were two competing implemtations of TCP/IP. UCB created sockets,
> which is sort of in the public domain. AT&T (I think they
> subcontracted BBN to actually do it) created streams.
> 
> My guess is that streams is based on AT&T patents and was never
> reverse engineered.
> 

That's not true. STREAMS was part of the Unix98 standard (now mostly 
superseded by the Linux Standard Base), and there was a STREAMS patch for it 
for the Linux kernel. However, AFAIR Linus was unwilling to apply it because 
he claimed it made everything else slower.

> So UNIX systems based on SYS V had streams, while UNIX systems based
> on BSD had sockets. SYS V Release 3.2 which was the first combined
> release (AT&T Kernel, both SYS V and BSD user land) had both.
> 
> I've never looked but AFAIK, MacOS which is the latest "real" UNIX has
> sockets but not streams.
> 
> Geoff.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

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