FreeBSD APIs

I'm documenting FreeBSD's departures from known standards/APIUE/UNP as I come across them in various man pages and source code. The entirety of the FreeBSD man pages can be browsed at http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi. This page serves as a companion to "Linux APIs" and "POSIX".

File descriptors

• kqueue(2), introduced in FreeBSD 4.1, is FreeBSD's "better poll(2)", ala epoll(7) on Linux.
• accept_filter(9)
• getfh() and openfh(), similar to Linux's name_to_handle_at() and open_by_handle_at()

Socket Options

SOL_SOCKET

• SO_ACCEPTFILTER (Introduced in FreeBSD 4.0): Apply an accept_filter(9) kernel module to the listen(2)ing socket. The connection will not be accept(2)able until the filter is satisfied. accf_data(9), satisfied by the receipt of any connection payload data, is roughly equivalent to Linux's TCP_DEFER_ACCEPT.

IPPROTO_TCP

• TCP_NOPUSH: Normally, every write operation to a TCP socket will result in an attempt to set the TCP PSH bit and transmit the queued data. With TCP_NOPUSH set, packets will be coalesced until either the MSS is reached, or the socket is closed. Compare to Linux's TCP_CORK.
  • It is my experience that clearing this flag will result in the transmission of queued data, but I cannot find documentation supporting this. Tony Finch's kernel patch seems to have been applied to FreeBSD 4.5, providing this behavior.