Hot Perimeters

All STREAMS modules and drivers in the Solaris operating environment must be D_MTSAFE, and must account for multithreading. Specifying an inner and/or outer perimeter will handle concurrency issues that the module writer may encounter while developing the module or driver. Experienced STREAMS programmers might decide that the perimeter should not have any synchronous entry points, and should run fully hot. To define a fully-hot perimeter, the module writer need only specify the D_MTSAFE flag without an inner perimeter type (D_MTPERQ, D_MTQPAIR, D_MTPERMOD) and without an outer perimeter (D_MTOUTPERIM).

Hardening Information. All STREAMS entry points run concurrently, and in a multiprocessor environment, there can be a put procedure running simultaneously with a service procedure or even a close procedure. So the writer must take precautions against kernel panics by making sure that other concurrent threads will not reference data the current thread is trying to change or remove.