7.4 Socket States

Some socket options have timing considerations about when to set or fetch the option versus the state of the socket. We mention these with the affected options.

The following socket options are inherited by a connected TCP socket from the listening socket (pp. 462–463 of TCPv2): SO_DEBUG, SO_DONTROUTE, SO_KEEPALIVE, SO_LINGER, SO_OOBINLINE, SO_RCVBUF, SO_RCVLOWAT, SO_SNDBUF, SO_SNDLOWAT, TCP_MAXSEG, and TCP_NODELAY. This is important with TCP because the connected socket is not returned to a server by accept until the three-way handshake is completed by the TCP layer. To ensure that one of these socket options is set for the connected socket when the three-way handshake completes, we must set that option for the listening socket.