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Date:      Mon, 22 Jan 1996 11:13:09 -0700 (MST)
From:      Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org>
To:        chuckr@glue.umd.edu (Chuck Robey)
Cc:        terry@lambert.org, wollman@lcs.mit.edu, leisner@sdsp.mc.xerox.com, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: streams
Message-ID:  <199601221813.LAA15509@phaeton.artisoft.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SUN.3.91.960120164217.2896A-100000@cappuccino.eng.umd.edu> from "Chuck Robey" at Jan 20, 96 04:49:02 pm

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> Terry, I lifted that analogy from Heidemann's paper, where he draws it.  
> He's the author of stackable FSs.  Besides, I think you take the analogy 
> too far; any analogy, if taken far enough, fails.

John drew the analogy to explain what the heck his strange looking
animal was.  I thought you were drawing the anaology the other way
to justify it on the basis of "if it's good for A, it's good for B".

> From Garrett's comments and yours, and they make sense, using streams for 
> a basis of networking is _bad_.  OK, but if I was proposing a streams 
> interface for character io only (maybe including ppp), would your 
> comments still be accurate?

I agree that the standard Streams architecture can be changed to be
generally more usable as other than a prototype environemnt.  But in
so doing, you would lose a lot of the basis for Streams as opposed to,
for instance, X-kernel (where they have already done the change work).

For character I/O (as Garrett points out), the overhead is much less
significant than the inherent delays in character I/O because of what
it is talking to (slow interfaces and slow humans).

It's interesting to note that the more recent versions of Solaris have
bypassed much of this and places telnetd/rlogind functionality directly
in the kernel a kernel threads.


					Terry Lambert
					terry@lambert.org
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.



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