STREAMS Programming Guide

Driver Flow Control

The same utilities (described in Chapter 10, Modules) and mechanisms used for module flow control are used by drivers.

When the message is queued, putq(9F) increments the value of q_count by the size of the message and compares the result to the driver's write high-watermark (q_hiwat) value. If the count reaches q_hiwat, putq(9F) sets the internal FULL indicator for the driver write queue. This causes messages from upstream to be halted (canputnext(9F) returns FALSE) until the write queue count drops below q_lowat. The driver messages waiting to be output through lpout are dequeued by the driver output interrupt routine with getq(9F), which decrements the count. If the resulting count is below q_lowat, getq(9F) back-enables any upstream queue that had been blocked.

For priority band data, qb_count, qb_hiwat, and qb_lowat are used.

STREAMS allows flow control to be used on the driver read side to handle temporary upstream blocks.

To some extent, a driver or a module can control when its upstream transmission becomes blocked. Control is available through the M_SETOPTS message (see Appendix A, Message Types) to modify the Stream head read-side flow control limits.