Appendix B STREAMS Support in Windows NT

STREAMS is an environment for network transport protocols that facilitates the porting of existing STREAMS-based stacks from other environments to Windows NT. It is a set of tools for the development of communication services. In the STREAMS environment, one or more drivers or modules are plumbed together to form a network transport provider.

Figure B.1 The STREAMS Environment

STREAMS provides:

1. A kernel-mode STREAMS environment.

2. A Transport Provider Interface (TPI)-compatible kernel-level interface for the upper edge of the STREAMS stack and translates this interface into the native NT transport interface, the Transport Driver Interface (TDI).

3. A Data Link Provider Interface (DLPI)-compatible kernel-level interface for the lower edge of the STREAMS stack and translates this interface into the native NT data link interface, Network Driver Interface Specification version 3.0(NDIS 3.0).

4. Additional utility functions to ease porting, including UNIX® kernel time and timer functions.

Further Readings on Streams

1. UNIX System V Release 4 Programmer’s Guide: STREAMS. ISBN 0-13-947003-4. Prentice-Hall. 1990.

2. Parallel STREAMS: A Multi-Processor Implementation. Arun Garg. Sequent Computer Systems. March 27, 1990.

3. Dynix/PTX STREAMS Kernel Programming Guide. Part No. 1003-48627-00. Sequent Computer Systems. 1989.

4. A STREAMS-based Data Link Provider Interface - Version 2. UNIX International. August 20, 1991.

Sections B.1 through B.7 of this appendix provide a functional specification of the Streams environment as supported under Windows NT.