[TUHS] Ethernet in /dev (was Re: Were all of you.. Hippies?)

[Joerg Schilling]

Norman Wilson <norman at oclsc.org> wrote:

> But is IP done that way in SVr4 (or at least in Solaris, its
> most-visible descendant)?  I had the impression that the
> IP stack was more like the BSD one, with everything coupled
> together within the kernel and a fundamentally socket interface.

The code has been implemented in a way that mainly differs in that "ifconfig" 
needs to be called with "ifconfig <ifname> plumb" before you can use the 
interface. 

In former times, sockets have been emulated in userland, but this prevents a 
socket filedescriptor returned from a dup(sockfd) to work as expected. As a 
result, POSIX later required sockets to be an integral part of the 
implementation and sockets went into the kernel again.

BTW: there was a paper from Sun that explains that sockets are faster then 
using the STREAMS based t_open() and friends.

Jörg

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