Transport Layer Interface
<networking, programming> (TLI, or "Transport Level Interface") A
protocol-independent interface for accessing network facilities, modelled after the
ISO transport layer (level 4), that first appeared in Unix SVR3.
TLI is defined by
SVID as transport mechanism for networking interfaces, in preference to sockets, which are biased toward
IP and friends.
A disavantage is that a process cannot use read/write directly, but has to use backends using
stdin and
stdout to communicate with the network connection.
TLI is implemented in SVR4 using the
STREAMS interface.
It adds no new system calls, just a library, libnsl_s.a.
The major functions are t_open, t_bind, t_connect, t_listen, t_accept, t_snd, t_rcv, read, write.
According to the
Solaris t_open
man page, XTI (X/OPEN Transport Interface) evolved from TLI, and supports the TLI
API for compatibility, with some variations on semantics.
