streams(4)

streams4

System v streams networking abi support

Usage

To link System V Release 4 (SVR4) STREAMS interprocess communication ABI support into the kernel: device streams

To load the SVR4 STREAMS interprocess communication ABI support kernel module:

kldload streams

Overview

The streams module provides limited System V Release 4 STREAMS interprocess communication ABI (application binary interface) compatibility for userland applications.

Internally, streams provides STREAMS handles by using socket creation kernel routines, and adding state-tracking information to the socket to permit manipulation by STREAMS emulation code in svr4(4). Hence, opening a stream device produces a result similar to what would be obtained by calling socket(2).

Applications should never use this interface directly: STREAMS emulation is only provided as a service to support ABI requirements in the SVR4 environment which svr4(4) needs to present to client binaries.

History

System V Release 4 ABI support first appeared in FreeBSD 4.0. The ABI was ported from an equivalent facility present in NetBSD 1.3 written by Christos Zoulas.

Bugs

This whole interface is a crude hack to produce STREAMS semantics through emulation over sockets.

Programmers who hope to be able to use this interface to provide SVR4 STREAMS services to BSD applications will be sorely disappointed.

From freebsd-manpages 6.0-5 in Debian 4.0 (Etch). Parsed by carta from the page's mdoc source.