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Q98593: Streams Development Environment

Article: Q98593
Product(s): Microsoft LAN Manager
Version(s): 
Operating System(s): 
Keyword(s): 
Last Modified: 30-JUL-2001

SUMMARY
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Streams is a development environment for network transports found in recent
versions of the UNIX operating system and a few other platforms, including
Windows NT. It functions as would a set of APIs for developing or rapidly
porting a network transport written in C, although it actually is privileged
driver code talking to the UNIX kernel or, in the case of Windows NT, to various
executive components. Streams on Windows NT is implemented as a kernel-level
DLL.

MORE INFORMATION
================

In Windows NT, the Streams environment has been enhanced to help deal with
multiprocessing issues such as the synchronization of driver-level resources,
which can be very complex in an SMP system. The NT extensions are based on and
compatible with Streams extensions done by Sequent for their SMP version of UNIX
(Dynix).

Streams is commonly but inaccurately thought of as an interprocess communication
method such as sockets. This is not so: Streams has nothing to do with the
behavior of a network transport at the application layer or on the wire. A
transport implemented in the Streams environment behaves like any other
transport, and neither applications on a given system nor networking code on
other systems can tell the transport is Streams-based.

Streams is useful mostly to people who implement network protocol stacks because
it allows them to port their code from one platform to another much more
efficiently than would otherwise be possible.


Additional query words: 2.00 2.10 2.10a 2.20

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