ChorusOS man pages section 7P: Protocols

intro(7P)

NAME

Intro- introduction to networking facilities

SYNOPSIS

#include <sys/types.h>

#include <sys/socket.h>

DESCRIPTION

This section briefly describes the networking facilities available on the system.

All network protocols are associated with a specific "protocol family". A protocol family provides basic services to the protocol implementation to allow it to function within a specific network environment. These services may include packet fragmentation and reassembly, routing, addressing and basic transport. A protocol family may support multiple methods of addressing, even if the current protocol implementations do not. A protocol family is normally comprised of a number of protocols, one per socket(2POSIX) type. It is not required that a protocol family support all socket types. A protocol family may contain multiple protocols supporting the same socket abstraction.

A protocol supports one of the socket abstractions detailed in socket(2POSIX). A specific protocol may be accessed either by creating a socket of the appropriate type and protocol family, or by requesting the protocol explicitly when creating a socket. Protocols normally accept only one type of address format, usually determined by the addressing structure inherent in the design of the protocol family/network architecture. Certain semantics of the basic socket abstractions are protocol--specific. All protocols should support the basic model for their particular socket type, but may also provide non-standard facilities or extensions to a mechanism. For example, a protocol supporting the SOCK_STREAM abstraction may allow more than one byte of out-of-band data to be transmitted per out-of-band message.

A network interface is similar to a device interface. Network interfaces comprise the lowest layer of the networking subsystem, interacting with the actual transport hardware. An interface may support one or more protocol families and/or address formats.

PROTOCOLS

The system currently supports the DARPA Internet protocols. Raw socket interfaces are provided to the IP protocol layer of the DARPA Internet. Consult the appropriate manual pages in this section for more information regarding the support for each protocol family.

ATTRIBUTES

See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:

ATTRIBUTE TYPE	ATTRIBUTE VALUE
Interface Stability	Evolving