12 Apr
2020
12 Apr
'20
12:03 p.m.
Date: Sat, 11 Apr 2020 08:44:28 -0700
From: Larry McVoy
On Sat, Apr 11, 2020 at 11:38:44AM -0400, Norman Wilson wrote:
It was streams, not STREAMS.
-- Stream I/O system added; all
communication-device
drivers (serial ports, Ethernet, Datakit) changed to
work with streams. Pipes were streams.
How was performance? Was this Dennis' streams, not Sys V STREAMS? I ported Lachmans/Convergents STREAMS based TCP/IP
stack to the
ETA 10 Unix and SCO Unix and performance just sucked. Ditto for
the Solaris port (which I did not do, I don't think it made any
difference who did the port though).
STREAMS are outside the limited scope I try to restrain myself to, but I’m intrigued.
What in the above case drove/caused the poor performance?
There was a debate on the LKML in the late 1990’s where Caldera wanted STREAMS support in
Linux and to the extent the arguments were technical *), my understanding of them is that
the main show stopper was that STREAMS would make ‘zero copy’ networking impossible. If
so, then it is a comment more about the underlying buffer strategy than STREAMS itself.
Did STREAMS also perform poorly in the 1986 context they were developed in?
Paul
*) Other arguments pro- and con included forward maintenance and market need, but I’m not
so interested in those aspects of the debate.