From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Andi Kleen Subject: Re: Must every packet have a creating socket? Date: Fri, 22 Apr 2005 13:39:46 +0200 Message-ID: References: <20050420172944.69275.qmail@web51501.mail.yahoo.com> <4266FFC4.6020305@hp.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Cc: Neil Horman , jamal , linux-net@vger.kernel.org, netdev@oss.sgi.com Return-path: To: Rick Jones In-Reply-To: <4266FFC4.6020305@hp.com> (Rick Jones's message of "Wed, 20 Apr 2005 18:20:04 -0700") Sender: linux-net-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: netdev.vger.kernel.org Rick Jones writes: >> Can I think that every packet (e.g. IP packet) must >> have a corresponding creating socket? (i.e. Must every >> packet be created by a socket?) > > No. ICMP messages come to mind - although I _suppose_ that since > those are in response to other traffic, you could claim it was in > response to something sent from a "socket" or "endpoint" - depends on > how far away you consider it to still be from a socket. Actually Linux has kernel private sockets for ICMP. Very old Linux didnt, but it required ugly special cases in the transmit path, so it was removed. -Andi