Date: Sat, 20 Jan 1996 15:00:51 -0500 From: "Garrett A. Wollman" <wollman@lcs.mit.edu> To: Chuck Robey <chuckr@glue.umd.edu> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: streams Message-ID: <9601202000.AA16340@halloran-eldar.lcs.mit.edu> In-Reply-To: <Pine.SUN.3.91.960119204530.9487C-100000@espresso.eng.umd.edu> References: <9601191924.AA10655@halloran-eldar.lcs.mit.edu> <Pine.SUN.3.91.960119204530.9487C-100000@espresso.eng.umd.edu>
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<<On Fri, 19 Jan 1996 20:47:52 -0500 (EST), Chuck Robey <chuckr@glue.umd.edu> said: > Garrett, I originated this stream, asking Mike Smith if he knew of any > streams-negativisms. Sounds like you do, would you care to amplify? I'm > really curious, because they seem like (to me) an analog to stackable > filesystems, for character io. Why not? I perhaps spoke a bit too strongly. STREAMS (which some people at research now call ``sewers'') is a sort of nice idea for character devices like keyboards, terminals, and other slow input devices. It is a really, really bad idea for network stacks, because of its bad buffering model and inappropriate interfaces. (Somewhere in this mess I call my ``office'' I have a paper by Van Jacobson and Someone Else where STREAMS earns an entire paragraph on the weakness of its buffering model.) Most people, when they say they would like to be able to use STREAMS stuff in the kernel, really mean, ``I've got this crawling horror STREAMS-based DECnet Phase IV stack that I'd like to get working so I can throw out this old Interactive box.'' This is not to say that the BSD socket code is all that wonderful for network development, either. (Indeed, some say it's a wonder we've managed to squeeze this much performance out of it.) However, for networking, STREAMS is a step in the wrong direction. -GAWollman -- Garrett A. Wollman | Shashish is simple, it's discreet, it's brief. ... wollman@lcs.mit.edu | Shashish is the bonding of hearts in spite of distance. Opinions not those of| It is a bond more powerful than absence. We like people MIT, LCS, ANA, or NSA| who like Shashish. - Claude McKenzie + Florent Vollant
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