Socket-layer functions¶

These functions are used by the user process to send or receive packets and to do other socket operations. For more information see their respective manual pages.

socket(2) creates a socket, connect(2) connects a socket to a remote socket address, the bind(2) function binds a socket to a local socket address, listen(2) tells the socket that new connections shall be accepted, and accept(2) is used to get a new socket with a new incoming connection. socketpair(2) returns two connected anonymous sockets (implemented only for a few local families like AF_UNIX)

send(2), sendto(2), and sendmsg(2) send data over a socket, and recv(2), recvfrom(2), recvmsg(2) receive data from a socket. poll(2) and select(2) wait for arriving data or a readiness to send data. In addition, the standard I/O operations like write(2), writev(2), sendfile(2), read(2), and readv(2) can be used to read and write data.

getsockname(2) returns the local socket address and getpeername(2) returns the remote socket address. getsockopt(2) and setsockopt(2) are used to set or get socket layer or protocol options. ioctl(2) can be used to set or read some other options.

close(2) is used to close a socket. shutdown(2) closes parts of a full-duplex socket connection.

Seeking, or calling pread(2) or pwrite(2) with a nonzero position is not supported on sockets.

It is possible to do nonblocking I/O on sockets by setting the O_NONBLOCK flag on a socket file descriptor using fcntl(2). Then all operations that would block will (usually) return with EAGAIN (operation should be retried later); connect(2) will return EINPROGRESS error. The user can then wait for various events via poll(2) or select(2).

An alternative to poll(2) and select(2) is to let the kernel inform the application about events via a SIGIO signal. For that the O_ASYNC flag must be set on a socket file descriptor via fcntl(2) and a valid signal handler for SIGIO must be installed via sigaction(2). See the Signals discussion below.

Socket address structures¶

Each socket domain has its own format for socket addresses, with a domain-specific address structure. Each of these structures begins with an integer "family" field (typed as sa_family_t) that indicates the type of the address structure. This allows the various system calls (e.g., connect(2), bind(2), accept(2), getsockname(2), getpeername(2)), which are generic to all socket domains, to determine the domain of a particular socket address.

To allow any type of socket address to be passed to interfaces in the sockets API, the type struct sockaddr is defined. The purpose of this type is purely to allow casting of domain-specific socket address types to a "generic" type, so as to avoid compiler warnings about type mismatches in calls to the sockets API.

In addition, the sockets API provides the data type struct sockaddr_storage. This type is suitable to accommodate all supported domain-specific socket address structures; it is large enough and is aligned properly. (In particular, it is large enough to hold IPv6 socket addresses.) The structure includes the following field, which can be used to identify the type of socket address actually stored in the structure:

    sa_family_t ss_family;

The sockaddr_storage structure is useful in programs that must handle socket addresses in a generic way (e.g., programs that must deal with both IPv4 and IPv6 socket addresses).

Socket options¶

The socket options listed below can be set by using setsockopt(2) and read with getsockopt(2) with the socket level set to SOL_SOCKET for all sockets. Unless otherwise noted, optval is a pointer to an int.

SO_ACCEPTCONN

Returns a value indicating whether or not this socket has been marked to accept connections with listen(2). The value 0 indicates that this is not a listening socket, the value 1 indicates that this is a listening socket. This socket option is read-only.

SO_BINDTODEVICE

Bind this socket to a particular device like “eth0”, as specified in the passed interface name. If the name is an empty string or the option length is zero, the socket device binding is removed. The passed option is a variable-length null-terminated interface name string with the maximum size of IFNAMSIZ. If a socket is bound to an interface, only packets received from that particular interface are processed by the socket. Note that this works only for some socket types, particularly AF_INET sockets. It is not supported for packet sockets (use normal bind(2) there).

Before Linux 3.8, this socket option could be set, but could not retrieved with getsockopt(2). Since Linux 3.8, it is readable. The optlen argument should contain the buffer size available to receive the device name and is recommended to be IFNAMSZ bytes. The real device name length is reported back in the optlen argument.

SO_BROADCAST

Set or get the broadcast flag. When enabled, datagram sockets are allowed to send packets to a broadcast address. This option has no effect on stream-oriented sockets.

SO_BSDCOMPAT

Enable BSD bug-to-bug compatibility. This is used by the UDP protocol module in Linux 2.0 and 2.2. If enabled ICMP errors received for a UDP socket will not be passed to the user program. In later kernel versions, support for this option has been phased out: Linux 2.4 silently ignores it, and Linux 2.6 generates a kernel warning (printk()) if a program uses this option. Linux 2.0 also enabled BSD bug-to-bug compatibility options (random header changing, skipping of the broadcast flag) for raw sockets with this option, but that was removed in Linux 2.2.

SO_DEBUG

Enable socket debugging. Only allowed for processes with the CAP_NET_ADMIN capability or an effective user ID of 0.

SO_DOMAIN (since Linux 2.6.32)

Retrieves the socket domain as an integer, returning a value such as AF_INET6. See socket(2) for details. This socket option is read-only.

SO_ERROR

Get and clear the pending socket error. This socket option is read-only. Expects an integer.

SO_DONTROUTE

Don't send via a gateway, send only to directly connected hosts. The same effect can be achieved by setting the MSG_DONTROUTE flag on a socket send(2) operation. Expects an integer boolean flag.

SO_KEEPALIVE

Enable sending of keep-alive messages on connection-oriented sockets. Expects an integer boolean flag.

SO_LINGER

Sets or gets the SO_LINGER option. The argument is a linger structure.

struct linger {


    int l_onoff;    /* linger active */


    int l_linger;   /* how many seconds to linger for */
};

When enabled, a close(2) or shutdown(2) will not return until all queued messages for the socket have been successfully sent or the linger timeout has been reached. Otherwise, the call returns immediately and the closing is done in the background. When the socket is closed as part of exit(2), it always lingers in the background.

SO_MARK (since Linux 2.6.25)

Set the mark for each packet sent through this socket (similar to the netfilter MARK target but socket-based). Changing the mark can be used for mark-based routing without netfilter or for packet filtering. Setting this option requires the CAP_NET_ADMIN capability.

SO_OOBINLINE

If this option is enabled, out-of-band data is directly placed into the receive data stream. Otherwise out-of-band data is passed only when the MSG_OOB flag is set during receiving.

SO_PASSCRED

Enable or disable the receiving of the SCM_CREDENTIALS control message. For more information see unix(7).

SO_PEEK_OFF (since Linux 3.4)

This option, which is currently supported only for unix(7) sockets, sets the value of the "peek offset" for the recv(2) system call when used with MSG_PEEK flag.

When this option is set to a negative value (it is set to -1 for all new sockets), traditional behavior is provided: recv(2) with the MSG_PEEK flag will peek data from the front of the queue.

When the option is set to a value greater than or equal to zero, then the next peek at data queued in the socket will occur at the byte offset specified by the option value. At the same time, the "peek offset" will be incremented by the number of bytes that were peeked from the queue, so that a subsequent peek will return the next data in the queue.i

If data is removed from the front of the queue via a call to recv(2) (or similar) without the MSG_PEEK flag, the "peek offset" will be decreased by the number of bytes removed. In other words, receiving data without the MSG_PEEK flag will cause the "peek offset" to be adjusted to maintain the correct relative position in the queued data, so that a subsequent peek will retrieve the data that would have been retrieved had the data not been removed.

For datagram sockets, if the "peek offset" points to the middle of a packet, the data returned will be marked with the MSG_TRUNC flag.

The following example serves to illustrate the use of SO_PEEK_OFF. Suppose a stream socket has the following queued input data:

aabbccddeeff

The following sequence of recv(2) calls would have the effect noted in the comments:

int ov = 4;                  // Set peek offset to 4
setsockopt(fd, SOL_SOCKET, SO_PEEK_OFF, &ov, sizeof(ov));
recv(fd, buf, 2, MSG_PEEK);  // Peeks "cc"; offset set to 6
recv(fd, buf, 2, MSG_PEEK);  // Peeks "dd"; offset set to 8
recv(fd, buf, 2, 0);         // Reads "aa"; offset set to 6
recv(fd, buf, 2, MSG_PEEK);  // Peeks "ee"; offset set to 8

SO_PEERCRED

Return the credentials of the foreign process connected to this socket. This is possible only for connected AF_UNIX stream sockets and AF_UNIX stream and datagram socket pairs created using socketpair(2); see unix(7). The returned credentials are those that were in effect at the time of the call to connect(2) or socketpair(2). The argument is a ucred structure; define the GNU_SOURCE feature test macro to obtain the definition of that structure from <sys/socket.h>. This socket option is read-only.

SO_PRIORITY

Set the protocol-defined priority for all packets to be sent on this socket. Linux uses this value to order the networking queues: packets with a higher priority may be processed first depending on the selected device queueing discipline. For ip(7), this also sets the IP type-of-service (TOS) field for outgoing packets. Setting a priority outside the range 0 to 6 requires the CAP_NET_ADMIN capability.

SO_PROTOCOL (since Linux 2.6.32)

Retrieves the socket protocol as an integer, returning a value such as IPPROTO_SCTP. See socket(2) for details. This socket option is read-only.

SO_RCVBUF

Sets or gets the maximum socket receive buffer in bytes. The kernel doubles this value (to allow space for bookkeeping overhead) when it is set using setsockopt(2), and this doubled value is returned by getsockopt(2). The default value is set by the /proc/sys/net/core/rmem_default file, and the maximum allowed value is set by the /proc/sys/net/core/rmem_max file. The minimum (doubled) value for this option is 256.

SO_RCVBUFFORCE (since Linux 2.6.14)

Using this socket option, a privileged (CAP_NET_ADMIN) process can perform the same task as SO_RCVBUF, but the rmem_max limit can be overridden.

SO_RCVLOWAT and SO_SNDLOWAT

Specify the minimum number of bytes in the buffer until the socket layer will pass the data to the protocol (SO_SNDLOWAT) or the user on receiving (SO_RCVLOWAT). These two values are initialized to 1. SO_SNDLOWAT is not changeable on Linux (setsockopt(2) fails with the error ENOPROTOOPT). SO_RCVLOWAT is changeable only since Linux 2.4. The select(2) and poll(2) system calls currently do not respect the SO_RCVLOWAT setting on Linux, and mark a socket readable when even a single byte of data is available. A subsequent read from the socket will block until SO_RCVLOWAT bytes are available.

SO_RCVTIMEO and SO_SNDTIMEO

Specify the receiving or sending timeouts until reporting an error. The argument is a struct timeval. If an input or output function blocks for this period of time, and data has been sent or received, the return value of that function will be the amount of data transferred; if no data has been transferred and the timeout has been reached then -1 is returned with errno set to EAGAIN or EWOULDBLOCK, or EINPROGRESS (for connect(2)) just as if the socket was specified to be nonblocking. If the timeout is set to zero (the default) then the operation will never timeout. Timeouts only have effect for system calls that perform socket I/O (e.g., read(2), recvmsg(2), send(2), sendmsg(2)); timeouts have no effect for select(2), poll(2), epoll_wait(2), and so on.

SO_REUSEADDR

Indicates that the rules used in validating addresses supplied in a bind(2) call should allow reuse of local addresses. For AF_INET sockets this means that a socket may bind, except when there is an active listening socket bound to the address. When the listening socket is bound to INADDR_ANY with a specific port then it is not possible to bind to this port for any local address. Argument is an integer boolean flag.

SO_SNDBUF

Sets or gets the maximum socket send buffer in bytes. The kernel doubles this value (to allow space for bookkeeping overhead) when it is set using setsockopt(2), and this doubled value is returned by getsockopt(2). The default value is set by the /proc/sys/net/core/wmem_default file and the maximum allowed value is set by the /proc/sys/net/core/wmem_max file. The minimum (doubled) value for this option is 2048.

SO_SNDBUFFORCE (since Linux 2.6.14)

Using this socket option, a privileged (CAP_NET_ADMIN) process can perform the same task as SO_SNDBUF, but the wmem_max limit can be overridden.

SO_TIMESTAMP

Enable or disable the receiving of the SO_TIMESTAMP control message. The timestamp control message is sent with level SOL_SOCKET and the cmsg_data field is a struct timeval indicating the reception time of the last packet passed to the user in this call. See cmsg(3) for details on control messages.

SO_TYPE

Gets the socket type as an integer (e.g., SOCK_STREAM). This socket option is read-only.

Signals¶

When writing onto a connection-oriented socket that has been shut down (by the local or the remote end) SIGPIPE is sent to the writing process and EPIPE is returned. The signal is not sent when the write call specified the MSG_NOSIGNAL flag.

When requested with the FIOSETOWN fcntl(2) or SIOCSPGRP ioctl(2), SIGIO is sent when an I/O event occurs. It is possible to use poll(2) or select(2) in the signal handler to find out which socket the event occurred on. An alternative (in Linux 2.2) is to set a real-time signal using the F_SETSIG fcntl(2); the handler of the real time signal will be called with the file descriptor in the si_fd field of its siginfo_t. See fcntl(2) for more information.

Under some circumstances (e.g., multiple processes accessing a single socket), the condition that caused the SIGIO may have already disappeared when the process reacts to the signal. If this happens, the process should wait again because Linux will resend the signal later.

/proc interfaces¶

The core socket networking parameters can be accessed via files in the directory /proc/sys/net/core/.

rmem_default

contains the default setting in bytes of the socket receive buffer.

rmem_max

contains the maximum socket receive buffer size in bytes which a user may set by using the SO_RCVBUF socket option.

wmem_default

contains the default setting in bytes of the socket send buffer.

wmem_max

contains the maximum socket send buffer size in bytes which a user may set by using the SO_SNDBUF socket option.

message_cost and message_burst

configure the token bucket filter used to load limit warning messages caused by external network events.

netdev_max_backlog

Maximum number of packets in the global input queue.

optmem_max

Maximum length of ancillary data and user control data like the iovecs per socket.

Ioctls¶

These operations can be accessed using ioctl(2):

error = ioctl(ip_socket, ioctl_type, &value_result);

SIOCGSTAMP

Return a struct timeval with the receive timestamp of the last packet passed to the user. This is useful for accurate round trip time measurements. See setitimer(2) for a description of struct timeval. This ioctl should be used only if the socket option SO_TIMESTAMP is not set on the socket. Otherwise, it returns the timestamp of the last packet that was received while SO_TIMESTAMP was not set, or it fails if no such packet has been received, (i.e., ioctl(2) returns -1 with errno set to ENOENT).

SIOCSPGRP

Set the process or process group to send SIGIO or SIGURG signals to when an asynchronous I/O operation has finished or urgent data is available. The argument is a pointer to a pid_t. If the argument is positive, send the signals to that process. If the argument is negative, send the signals to the process group with the ID of the absolute value of the argument. The process may only choose itself or its own process group to receive signals unless it has the CAP_KILL capability or an effective UID of 0.

FIOASYNC

Change the O_ASYNC flag to enable or disable asynchronous I/O mode of the socket. Asynchronous I/O mode means that the SIGIO signal or the signal set with F_SETSIG is raised when a new I/O event occurs.

Argument is an integer boolean flag. (This operation is synonymous with the use of fcntl(2) to set the O_ASYNC flag.)

SIOCGPGRP

Get the current process or process group that receives SIGIO or SIGURG signals, or 0 when none is set.

Valid fcntl(2) operations:

FIOGETOWN

The same as the SIOCGPGRP ioctl(2).

FIOSETOWN

The same as the SIOCSPGRP ioctl(2).