TCP/IP Illustrated

Chapter 15. Socket Layer

15.1. Introduction

This chapter is the first of three that cover the socket-layer code in Net/3. The socket abstraction was introduced with the 4.2BSD release in 1983 to provide a uniform interface to network and interprocess communication protocols. The Net/3 release discussed here is based on the 4.3BSD Reno version of sockets, which is slightly different from the earlier 4.2 releases used by many Unix vendors.

As described in Section 1.7, the socket layer maps protocol-independent requests from a process to the protocol-specific implementation selected when the socket was created.

To allow standard Unix I/O system calls such as read and write to operate with network connections, the filesystem ...