[TUHS] Sockets and the true UNIX

[lm@mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy)]

On Thu, Sep 21, 2017 at 09:13:38AM -0700, Jon Steinhart wrote:
> Maybe this is naive of me, but I have never liked parts of the sockets
> interface.  I understand that at some level it was a political/legal
> keeping the networking code independent of the rest of the kernel.
> >From a technical and historical standpoint, I view it as the tip of
> the iceberg bloating the number of system calls.
> 
> In particular, I have often thought that it would have been a better
> and more consistent with the philosophy to have it implemented as
> open("/dev/tcp") and so on.  Granted that networking added some new
> functionality that justified some of the system calls, just not socket().

If you look in the lmbench code I sort of had similar thoughts but did
them as functions.  I've never been fond of the socket API though I
am sympathetic, it's easy to do the easy parts as /dev/tcp but as I
recall there are all sorts of weird cases that don't fit.  I've tried
to come up with a /dev/tcp style that covers all the cases and I failed.

lib_tcp.h
#include        <sys/types.h>
#include        <sys/socket.h>
#include        <netinet/in.h>
#include        <netdb.h>
#include        <arpa/inet.h>

int     tcp_server(int prog, int rdwr);
int     tcp_done(int prog);
int     tcp_accept(int sock, int rdwr);
int     tcp_connect(char *host, int prog, int rdwr);
void    sock_optimize(int sock, int rdwr);
int     sockport(int s);
#ifndef NO_PORTMAPPER
u_short pmap_getport(struct sockaddr_in *addr, u_long prognum, u_long versnum,
u_int protocol);
bool_t  pmap_set(u_long prognum, u_long versnum, u_long protocol, u_short port);
bool_t  pmap_unset(u_long prognum, u_long versnum);
#endif