1. Oracle Solaris 11.4 Programming Interfaces Guide
  2. Programming With XTI and TLI
  3. Guidelines to Protocol Independence

Guidelines to Protocol Independence

The set of XTI/TLI services, common to many transport protocols, offers protocol independence to applications. Not all transport protocols support all XTI/TLI services. If software must run in a variety of protocol environments, use only the common services.

The following is a list of services that might not be common to all transport protocols.

  • In connection mode service, a transport service data unit (TSDU) might not be supported by all transport providers. Make no assumptions about preserving logical data boundaries across a connection.

  • Protocol and implementation-specific service limits are returned by the t_open(3C) and t_getinfo(3C) routines. Use these limits to allocate buffers to store protocol-specific transport addresses and options.

  • Do not send user data with connect requests or disconnect requests, such as t_connect(3C) and t_snddis(3C). Not all transport protocols can use this method.

  • The buffers in the t_call structure used for t_listen(3C) must be large enough to hold any data sent by the client during connection establishment. Use the T_ALL argument to t_alloc(3C) to set maximum buffer sizes to store the address, options, and user data for the current transport provider.

  • Do not specify a protocol address on t_bind(3C) on a client-side endpoint. The transport provider should assign an appropriate address to the transport endpoint. A server should retrieve its address for t_bind(3C) in a way that does not require knowledge of the transport provider's name space.

  • Do not make assumptions about formats of transport addresses. Transport addresses should not be constants in a program. For more information about transport selection, see Transport Selection and Name-to-Address Mapping.

  • The reason codes associated with t_rcvdis(3C) are protocol-dependent. Do not interpret these reason codes if protocol independence is important.

  • The t_rcvuderr(3C) error codes are protocol dependent. Do not interpret these error codes if protocol independence is a concern.

  • Do not code the names of devices into programs. The device node identifies a particular transport provider and is not protocol independent. For more information about transport selection, see Transport Selection and Name-to-Address Mapping.

  • Do not use the optional orderly release facility of the connection mode service, provided by t_sndrel() and t_rcvrel(), in programs targeted for multiple protocol environments. This facility is not supported by all connection-based transport protocols. Using the facility can prevent programs from successfully communicating with open systems. For more information, see the t_sndrel(3C) and t_rcvrel(3C) man pages.