Supported Protocols

Network protocols define how messages are formatted and packaged for transmission over the network. They provide support for sockets, which are endpoints for communication, described in socket(2POSIX).

ChorusOS systems provide support for the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) over the Internet Protocol (IP). TCP is a high-level, reliable, connection-oriented protocol. In other words, it verifies that messages it sends get to their destinations and resends them if necessary. In order to do so, TCP relies on connections between the sender and the receiver. In contrast, UDP is also high-level, but is unreliable. It sends messages without verifying whether they arrive or not, making UDP faster and less resource-hungry than TCP. Both TCP and UDP sit atop the lower-lever IP, which is a transport protocol. For details about the ChorusOS implementations of these protocols, see ip(7P), tcp(7P), and udp(7P).

ChorusOS systems also support remote inter-process communication (remote IPC), by allowing you to create an IPC stack in the IOM system actor and attach the stack to an Ethernet device. For details, see ethIpcStackAttach(2K) and IPC(5FEA).

Finally, ChorusOS systems provide a mechanism to support Open Systems Interconnect (OSI), by allowing you to attach an OSI stack that you provide to an Ethernet device. For details, see ethOsiStackAttach(2K).