[erlang-questions] prim_inet:accept() bug with {fd, N} socket option?

Serge Aleynikov saleyn@REDACTED
Mon Oct 8 03:32:36 CEST 2007


Per Hedeland wrote:
> Serge Aleynikov <saleyn@REDACTED> wrote:
>> gen_tcp:connect/2, gen_tcp:listen/2 functions expose an option {fd, 
>> FileDescriptor} that allows to take an elsewhere opened file descriptor 
>> and make it usable in the gen_tcp module.  This is a very convenient 
>> option, however, what I discovered was that the default options that are 
>> being set on a socket by prim_inet:accept_opts/2 call involved in 
>> gen_tcp:accept/1 try to get/set a 'priority' option that may not be 
>> supported
> 
> Well, it's rather dubious to pass in a non-inet socket to the inet
> modules/driver, 

What else would be the use of the {fd, N} option in gen_tcp:connect/2, 
gen_tcp:listen/2?  I would think that Unix Domain Sockets (UDS) is a 
rather good example or else one would need to mirror all 
gen_tcp/inet_tcp/prim_inet functionality to support UDS.

Ideally the inet_drv along with gen_tcp/inet_tcp/prim_inet would be 
extended to be able to support UDS on Unix-like platforms.

> but anyway the problem you're running into isn't really
> that 'priority' isn't supported (SO_PRIORITY is a Linux-specific thing
> AFAIK, but it's a socket-level option and so works for any type of
> socket), but rather that the driver does some pretty ugly things in an
> attempt to make 'priority' and 'tos' appear to be independent, even
> though they aren't at the OS level (it's a mistake to do this I think,
> but let's ignore that for the moment).

Ah, I suspected that after reading comments in setopt_prio_tos_trick(). ;-)

> This has the effect that it ends up trying to set the IP_TOS option on
> your unix-domain socket, which doesn't work of course, and then it gives
> up on the whole thing even though it was actually SO_PRIORITY that was
> requested (from the prim_inet code you quoted).
> 
> Below is a patch that addresses this - it's against R10B-10 though, and
> won't apply against current versions since even though the code is
> essentially the same there, it has moved around a bit. But maybe you can
> convert it - or just comment out the whole setopt_prio_tos_trick() thing
> there.:-)

Thank you very much, this is very helpful!

> I have subsequently hacked prim_inet and inet_drv to handle arbitrary
> non-inet sockets "properly", i.e. allow for passing in 'unspec' (as in
> AF_UNSPEC) as the address family, and in that case refrain from doing
> *any* AF_INET/AF_INET6-specific get/setsockopts, as well as
> getsockname() and getpeername() (since the address format is unknown).
> It's perhaps still a bit dubious to "abuse" the inet code this way
> though, but you sure get a lot of stuff for free that way...

Perhaps you could send these patches as well and the OTP team could 
consider including them in the distribution?

Regards,

Serge




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