On Mon, 2010-10-11 at 00:11 +0200, Philipp Thomas wrote:
[Sorry for jumping in late but I just returned from holiday in beautiful Provence]
On Fri, 01 Oct 2010 08:50:37 +0200, Roger Oberholtzer
wrote: Unix SVR4.2 has a concept of stream drivers. These were modules that you could stack to process data (e.g. TCP) in a pipeline.
And that was utter nonsense! Very nice in theory but a nightmare in reality. Streams were invented for serail lines and there the concept of stackable modules made sense. But extending that idea toTCP/IP was a grave mistake. Guess why it was never really implemented in Linux?
I never used it. I just saw a connection between streams and what I was/am looking for. I do confess to be confused about why you considered it to be good for serial lines and not TCP/IP. Granted TCP/IP offers more variations than a serial line, and that could make implementation of stream modules more complicated. But that does not mean the streams concept was wrong. As to why it is not in Linux, well, I guess it never really caught on like wild fire on SVR4 (including Solaris at the time, which I think also had streams - does Solaris have streams today?). I think the reason was primarily that it was not a portable concept more than it being a bad one. An application relying on streams would not port to other flavors of Unix. If the core streams implementation had somehow been portable, I venture a guess that it may have been more popular. It moves lots of file handling from the kernel into user space via a well-defined interface. -- Roger Oberholtzer OPQ Systems / Ramböll RST Ramböll Sverige AB Krukmakargatan 21 P.O. Box 17009 SE-104 62 Stockholm, Sweden Office: Int +46 10-615 60 20 Mobile: Int +46 70-815 1696 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-programming+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-programming+help@opensuse.org