sockaddr Explained

Kas Lewis

Can someone please explain the sockaddr format. To be specific why is sa_data 14 bytes long ? The IP address is only 4 bytes long and the port is 2 bytes giving 6 bytes, what are the other 8 bytes used for ?

Thanks

Kas

over 10 years ago

0 Ivor Sargoytchev over 10 years ago

Expert 2685 points

Yes, too long for IPv4 and too short for IPv6 - what's up with that?

0 Kas Lewis over 10 years ago in reply to Ivor Sargoytchev

Expert 1740 points

Just wondering if anyone has a a suggestion why this is so....

Thanks

0 Alan over 10 years ago in reply to Kas Lewis

Expert 2260 points

The CC3000 socket interface is based off BSD sockets. This link refers to POSIX sockets, but probably also applies to BSD. Most likely it was included so there was redundancy for future revisions, to reduce the likelihood of major changes to the API.

http://lists.kernelnewbies.org/pipermail/kernelnewbies/2011-February/000966.html

In theory, TI could have removed this to save some memory at the cost of not being BSD compliant, but I'm sure they had their reasons.

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sockaddr Explained