Overview

#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/time.h>
#include <sys/socket.h>
#include <net/if.h>
#include <net/route.h>

This section introduces the networking facilities available in the system. Documentation is broken up into three areas: protocol families (domains), protocols, and network interfaces.

All network protocols are associated with a specific protocol family. A protocol family provides basic services to the protocol implementation to allow it to function within a specific network environment. These services may include packet fragmentation and reassembly, routing, addressing, and basic transport. A protocol family may support multiple methods of addressing, though the current protocol implementations do not. A protocol family is normally comprised of a number of protocols, one per socket type. It is not required that a protocol family support all socket types. A protocol family may contain multiple protocols supporting the same socket abstraction.

A protocol supports one of the socket abstractions detailed in socket. A specific protocol may be accessed either by creating a socket of the appropriate type and protocol family, or by requesting the protocol explicitly when creating a socket. Protocols normally accept only one type of address format, usually determined by the addressing structure inherent in the design of the protocol family/network architecture. Certain semantics of the basic socket abstractions are protocol specific. All protocols are expected to support the basic model for their particular socket type, but may, in addition, provide non-standard facilities or extensions to a mechanism. For example, a protocol supporting the SOCK_STREAM abstraction may allow more than one byte of out-of-band data to be transmitted per out-of-band message.

A network interface is similar to a device interface. Network interfaces comprise the lowest layer of the networking subsystem, interacting with the actual transport hardware. An interface may support one or more protocol families and/or address formats. The DIAGNOSTICS section lists messages which may appear on the console and/or in the system error log, due to errors in device operation.

Protocols

The system currently supports the Internet protocols. Raw socket interfaces are provided to the IP protocol layer of the Internet. Consult the appropriate manual pages in this section for more information regarding the support for each protocol family.

Addressing

Associated with each protocol family is an address format. All network addresses adhere to a general structure, called a sockaddr, described below. However, each protocol imposes finer and more specific structure, generally renaming the variant, which is discussed in the protocol family manual page alluded to above.

struct sockaddr {
    u_char         sa_len;
    u_char         sa_family;
    char           sa_data[14];
};

The field sa_len contains the total length of the structure, which may exceed 16 bytes. The following address value for sa_family is known to the system:

#define AF_INET      2    /* internetwork: UDP, TCP, etc. */

Routing

FreeBSD provides some packet routing facilities. The kernel maintains a routing information database, which is used in selecting the appropriate network interface when transmitting packets.

A user process (or possibly multiple co-operating processes) maintains this database by sending messages over a special kind of socket. This supplants fixed size ioctl used in earlier releases.

Interfaces

Each network interface in a system corresponds to a path through which messages may be sent and received. A network interface usually has a hardware device associated with it, though certain interfaces such as the loopback interface, lo, do not.

The following ioctl calls may be used to manipulate network interfaces. The ioctl() is made on a socket (typically of type SOCK_DGRAM) in the desired domain. Most of the requests supported in earlier releases take an ifreq structure as its parameter. This structure has the form:

  struct  ifreq {
     #define    IFNAMSIZ    16
         char    ifr_name[IFNAMSIZ];        /* if name, e.g. "en0" */
         union {
             struct    sockaddr ifru_addr;
             struct    sockaddr ifru_dstaddr;
             struct    sockaddr ifru_broadaddr;
             short     ifru_flags[2];
             short     ifru_index;
             int       ifru_metric;
             int       ifru_mtu;
             int       ifru_phys;
             int       ifru_media;
             caddr_t   ifru_data;
             int       ifru_cap[2];
         } ifr_ifru;
     #define ifr_addr      ifr_ifru.ifru_addr      /* address */
     #define ifr_dstaddr   ifr_ifru.ifru_dstaddr   /* other end of p-to-p link */
     #define ifr_broadaddr ifr_ifru.ifru_broadaddr /* broadcast address */
     #define ifr_flags     ifr_ifru.ifru_flags[0]  /* flags (low 16 bits) */
     #define ifr_flagshigh ifr_ifru.ifru_flags[1]  /* flags (high 16 bits) */
     #define ifr_metric    ifr_ifru.ifru_metric    /* metric */
     #define ifr_mtu       ifr_ifru.ifru_mtu       /* mtu */
     #define ifr_phys      ifr_ifru.ifru_phys      /* physical wire */
     #define ifr_media     ifr_ifru.ifru_media     /* physical media */
     #define ifr_data      ifr_ifru.ifru_data      /* for use by interface */
     #define ifr_reqcap    ifr_ifru.ifru_cap[0]    /* requested capabilities */
     #define ifr_curcap    ifr_ifru.ifru_cap[1]    /* current capabilities */
     #define ifr_index     ifr_ifru.ifru_index     /* interface index */
     };

Calls which are now deprecated are:

• SIOCSIFADDR
  Set interface address for protocol family. Following the address assignment, the 'initialization' routine for the interface is called.
• SIOCSIFDSTADDR
  Set point to point address for protocol family and interface.
• SIOCSIFBRDADDR
  Set broadcast address for protocol family and interface.

ioctl() requests to obtain addresses and requests both to set and retrieve other data are still fully supported and use the ifreq structure:

• SIOCGIFADDR
  Get interface address for protocol family.
• SIOCGIFDSTADDR
  Get point to point address for protocol family and interface.
• SIOCGIFBRDADDR
  Get broadcast address for protocol family and interface.
• SIOCSIFCAP
  Attempt to set the enabled capabilities field for the interface to the value of the ifr_reqcap field of the ifreq structure. Note that, depending on the particular interface features, some capabilities may appear hard-coded to enabled, or toggling a capability may affect the status of other ones. The supported capabilities field is read-only, and the ifr_curcap field is unused by this call.
• SIOCGIFCAP
  Get the interface capabilities fields. The values for supported and enabled capabilities will be returned in the ifr_reqcap and ifr_curcap fields of the ifreq structure, respectively.
• SIOCSIFFLAGS
  Set interface flags field. If the interface is marked down, any processes currently routing packets through the interface are notified; some interfaces may be reset so that incoming packets are no longer received. When marked up again, the interface is reinitialized.
• SIOCGIFFLAGS
  Get interface flags.
• SIOCSIFMETRIC
  Set interface routing metric. The metric is used only by user-level routers.
• SIOCGIFMETRIC
  Get interface metric.
• SIOCSIFMTU
  Set interface MTU (Maximum transfer unit. For Ethernet interfaces this is 1500 by default but some controllers allow this to be increased up to as much as 9216 bytes.
• SIOCGIFMTU
  Get interface MTU.
• SIOCIFCREATE
  Attempt to create the specified interface. If the interface name is given without a unit number the system will attempt to create a new interface with an arbitrary unit number. On successful return the ifr_name field will contain the new interface name.
• SIOCIFDESTROY
  Attempt to destroy the specified interface.

There are two requests that make use of a new structure:

• SIOCAIFADDR
  An interface may have more than one address associated with it in some protocols. This request provides a means to add additional addresses (or modify characteristics of the primary address if the default address for the address family is specified). Rather than making separate calls to set destination or broadcast addresses, or network masks (now an integral feature of multiple protocols) a separate structure is used to specify all three facets simultaneously (see below). One would use a slightly tailored version of this struct specific to each family (replacing each sockaddr by one of the family-specific type). Where the sockaddr itself is larger than the default size, one needs to modify the ioctl() identifier itself to include the total size, as described in ioctl().
• SIOCDIFADDR
  This requests deletes the specified address from the list associated with an interface. It also uses the ifaliasreq structure to allow for the possibility of protocols allowing multiple masks or destination addresses, and also adopts the convention that specification of the default address means to delete the first address for the interface belonging to the address family in which the original socket was opened.

• SIOCGIFCONF
  Get interface configuration list. This request takes an ifconf structure (see below) as a value-result parameter. The ifc_len field should be initially set to the size of the buffer pointed to by ifc_buf. On return it will contain the length, in bytes, of the configuration list.
• SIOCIFGCLONERS
  Get list of clonable interfaces. This request takes an if_clonereq structure (see below) as a value-result parameter. The ifcr_count field should be set to the number of IFNAMSIZ sized strings that can be fit in the buffer pointed to by ifcr_buffer. On return, ifcr_total will be set to the number of clonable interfaces and the buffer pointed to by ifcr_buffer will be filled with the names of clonable interfaces aligned on IFNAMSIZ boundaries.

  /*
     * Structure used in SIOCAIFCONF request.
     */
     struct ifaliasreq {
             char    ifra_name[IFNAMSIZ];   /* if name, e.g. "en0" */
             struct  sockaddr        ifra_addr;
             struct  sockaddr        ifra_broadaddr;
             struct  sockaddr        ifra_mask;
     };

     /*
     * Structure used in SIOCGIFCONF request.
     * Used to retrieve interface configuration
     * for machine (useful for programs which
     * must know all networks accessible).
     */
     struct ifconf {
         int   ifc_len;              /* size of associated buffer */
         union {
             caddr_t    ifcu_buf;
             struct     ifreq *ifcu_req;
         } ifc_ifcu;
     #define ifc_buf ifc_ifcu.ifcu_buf /* buffer address */
     #define ifc_req ifc_ifcu.ifcu_req /* array of structures returned */
     };

     /* Structure used in SIOCIFGCLONERS request. */
     struct if_clonereq {
             int     ifcr_total;     /* total cloners (out) */
             int     ifcr_count;     /* room for this many in user buffer */
             char    *ifcr_buffer;   /* buffer for cloner names */
     };

Requirements