UNIX IPC Datagram Reliability under 4.2BSD

Brian Thomson thomson at utcsrgv.UUCP
Thu Jan 19 08:44:23 AEST 1984


The easy answer is that UNIX-domain datagrams are unreliable because
they are full of bugs.  The eye-for-the-future answer is that you get
indications of SOME errors (i.e. destination address is not a socket
or not a datagram socket) but not others.

In particular, if you send a message to a socket that doesn't have
sufficient buffer resources to hold it, the datagram is silently discarded.

At least, that's what I THINK happens.  It's difficult to test because
of the bugs.
-- 
			Brian Thomson,	    CSRG Univ. of Toronto
			{linus,ihnp4,uw-beaver,floyd,utzoo}!utcsrgv!thomson



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