Does ISC DHCP work with BPF?

sangeeta.misra at oracle.com sangeeta.misra at oracle.com
Mon Feb 28 00:48:49 UTC 2011


  On 02/27/11 09:55 AM, Chris Buxton wrote:
> Some quick research shows that BPF is associated with Berkeley sockets, while DLPI is associated with the streams implementation on Solaris and a few others. Apparently AIX tries to support both, probably by emulating one with the other; otherwise, you are likely to find a given OS supports zero or one, but not both. Linux offers its own PF, for example, which can be used to emulate BPF.
>
> Note that Solaris switched from sockets to streams many years ago. Early versions of SunOS (e.g. SunOS 4) used sockets. I'm not sure exactly when the switch occurred, but I believe it has been over a decade.
>
> Mac OS 7.5.2 - 9 used streams (which they called Open Transport), but Mac OS X uses sockets (from the BSD kernel code they've used).
Thanks for the info. Solaris now supports both BPF and DLPI. However I 
cannot get it ISC DHCP software to use BPF successfully though because 
the code seems to use getifaddrs() to obtain hardware address of an 
interface ( see common/bpf.c). This fails  because in Solaris 
getifaddrs() only seems to provide IP address.

This is why I was wondering if the  ISC DHCP's BPF support works on any 
OS or not.

Sangeeta



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