Re: The unreliability of AF_UNIX datagram sockets

[Ken Brown <kbrown@cornell.edu>]

On 5/22/2021 12:50 PM, Ken Brown wrote:
> On 5/22/2021 11:49 AM, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
>> On May 21 17:54, Ken Brown wrote:
>>> On 5/20/2021 3:25 PM, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
>>>> On May 20 09:46, Ken Brown wrote:
>>>>> On 4/29/2021 7:05 AM, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
>>>>>> I think it should be possible to switch to STREAM sockets to emulate
>>>>>> DGRAM semantics.  Our advantage is that this is all local.  For all
>>>>>> practical purposes there's no chance data gets really lost.  Windows has
>>>>>> an almost indefinite send buffer.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> If you look at the STREAM as a kind of tunneling layer for getting DGRAM
>>>>>> messages over the (local) line, the DGRAM content could simply be
>>>>>> encapsulated in a tunnel packet or frame, basically the same way the
>>>>>> new, boring AF_UNIX code does it.  A DGRAM message encapsulated in a
>>>>>> STREAM message always has a header which at least contains the length of
>>>>>> the actual DGRAM message.  So when the peer reads from the socket, it
>>>>>> always only reads the header until it's complete.  Then it knows how
>>>>>> much payload is expected and then it reads until the payload has been
>>>>>> received.
>>>>>
>>>>> I think I'd like to go ahead and try to do this DGRAM emulation in the
>>>>> current (AF_LOCAL) code.  It shouldn't be too hard, and it would solve the
>>>>> unreliability problem while we look for a better way to handle AF_UNIX
>>>>> sockets.
>>>>
>>>> Yeah, sounds like the way to go for now.
>>>
>>> Unfortunately, I ran into a problem.  Trying to emulate DGRAM sockets in
>>> STREAM sockets breaks the DGRAM send/recv semantics.  For example,
>>> WSARecvFrom won't return the source address.
>>
>> It doesn't anyway, does it?  I mean, this is entirely local and the
>> source address is, basically, the same socket.
> 
>  From the Winsock point of view, the sending socket is an AF_INET socket, whose 
> name is a struct sockaddr_in (the crucial data being the port number). 
> fhandler_socket_local::recv_internal then converts the sockaddr_in of the sender 
> to an abstract sockaddr_un that encodes the port number, so that the receiver 
> can send back a reply.

Wait a minute.... I don't think this is a problem after all.  The sender can 
simply include its own address in the packet it sends, as in the new AF_UNIX code.

> Aside from this issue, there's also the fact that all the send/recv functions 
> when applied to STREAM sockets expect the socket to be connected.  But if we're 
> using STREAM sockets to emulate DGRAM sockets, they typically won't be 
> connected.  (And "connected" means something different for DGRAMs anyway.)

But I'm still worried about this issue.

Ken