[libvirt] [ottlik at fzi.de: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH RFC] Do not set SO_REUSEADDR on Windows]

Daniel P. Berrange berrange at redhat.com
Wed Sep 4 14:48:21 UTC 2013


----- Forwarded message from Sebastian Ottlik <ottlik at fzi.de> -----
>
> This patchset disabels all use of SO_REUSEADDR on Windows. On Windows systems
> the default behavior is equivalent to SO_REUSEADDR on other operating
> systems. SO_REUSEADDR can still be set but results in undesired bahvior
> instead. It may even lead to situations were system behavior is
> unspecified. More information on this can be found at:
> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms740621.aspx
----- End forwarded message -----

Read that doc and cry. In summary

 - On UNIX, SO_REUSEADDR allows an application to re-bind to a socket
   while it is in the CLOSE_WAIT state.

 - On Windows, you can always bind to a socket in CLOSE_WAIT state and
   AFAIK you can't disable this behaviour. Setting SO_REUSEADDR lets
   you bind to a socket when in *any* state.

So if code originating on Linux is blindly setting SO_REUSEADDR it is
almost certainly broken on Windows. Windows' interpretation of SO_REUSEADDR
is somewhat closer to the new Linux v3.9 flag SO_REUSEPORT

  http://freeprogrammersblog.vhex.net/post/linux-39-introdued-new-way-of-writing-socket-servers/2
  https://lwn.net/Articles/542629/

but the behaviour of SO_REUSEADDR is undefined on Windows for non-multicast
sockets, while Linux explicitly says it'll round-robin accept() calls, so
they're still not a perfect match.

So without a way to 100% map the different semantics I don't think its
practical for gnulib to save us from this madness and so we'll just want
to #ifndef WIN32 the use of SO_REUSEADDR in Libvirt

Regards,
Daniel
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