Using the stream pipe driver in SVR3

[Ron Karr]

Our company is developing a product under System V release 4.0 that
uses interprocess communication between several utilities and a
daemon utility.  This is hardly uncommon in the modern-day world of
utilities, and the STREAMS facilities in SVR4.0 are entirely sufficient
for this task.  However, we also want to back-port the software to
release 3.2.  The question is then, of course, how does one setup a
reasonable multi-plexed IPC mechanism in SVR3?

If you can manage to create a stream connection between a utility and
the daemon, you are home free, since the facilities exist to do
multi-plexed I/O to STREAMS.  "Glancing" through the source code,
it appears that the best possibility is to use the /dev/spx device
to create two stream pipe end-points, tie them together, and use them
as the basis of the IPC mechanism.  This is exactly what the comment
at the top of the "sp.c" source file says to do.  However, I haven't
been able to figure out how to "connect" two stream pipes together.

If anyone knows how to actually use the /dev/spx device, or if anyone
knows of a better way to do reliable multiplexed communiation between
unrelated processes in SVR3.2, please send E-mail.
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