15.1 Introduction

The Unix domain protocols are not an actual protocol suite, but a way of performing client/server communication on a single host using the same API that is used for clients and servers on different hosts. The Unix domain protocols are an alternative to the interprocess communication (IPC) methods described in Volume 2 of this series, when the client and server are on the same host. Details on the actual implementation of Unix domain sockets in a Berkeley-derived kernel are provided in part 3 of TCPv3.

Two types of sockets are provided in the Unix domain: stream sockets (similar to TCP) and datagram sockets (similar to UDP). Even though a raw socket is also provided, its semantics have never been documented, it is not used by any program that the authors are aware of, and it is not defined by POSIX.

Unix domain sockets are used for three reasons:

On Berkeley-derived implementations, Unix domain sockets are often twice as fast as a TCP socket when both peers are on the same host (pp. 223–224 of TCPv3). One application takes advantage of this: the X Window System. When an X11 client starts and opens a connection to the X11 server, the client checks the value of the DISPLAY environment variable, which specifies the server's hostname, window, and screen. If the server is on the same host as the client, the client opens a Unix domain stream connection to the server; otherwise the client opens a TCP connection to the server.
Unix domain sockets are used when passing descriptors between processes on the same host. We will provide a complete example of this in Section 15.7.
Newer implementations of Unix domain sockets provide the client's credentials (user ID and group IDs) to the server, which can provide additional security checking. We will describe this in Section 15.8.

The protocol addresses used to identify clients and servers in the Unix domain are pathnames within the normal filesystem. Recall that IPv4 uses a combination of 32-bit addresses and 16-bit port numbers for its protocol addresses, and IPv6 uses a combination of 128-bit addresses and 16-bit port numbers for its protocol addresses. These pathnames are not normal Unix files: We cannot read from or write to these files except from a program that has associated the pathname with a Unix domain socket.

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