What is the difference between struct addrinfo and struct sockaddr

Question

From what I understand struct addrinfo is used to prep the socket address structure and struct sockaddr contains socket address information. But what does that actually mean? struct addrinfo contains a pointer to a struct sockaddr. Why keep them separate? Why can't we combine all things within sockaddr into addr_info?

I'm just guessing here but is the reason for their separation is to save space when passing structs? For example in the bind() call, all it needs is the port number and the internet address. So both of these are grouped in a struct sockaddr. So, we can just pass this small struct instead of the larger struct addrinfo?

struct addrinfo {
    int              ai_flags;     // AI_PASSIVE, AI_CANONNAME, etc.
    int              ai_family;    // AF_INET, AF_INET6, AF_UNSPEC
    int              ai_socktype;  // SOCK_STREAM, SOCK_DGRAM
    int              ai_protocol;  // use 0 for "any"
    size_t           ai_addrlen;   // size of ai_addr in bytes
    struct sockaddr *ai_addr;      // struct sockaddr_in or _in6
    char            *ai_canonname; // full canonical hostname

    struct addrinfo *ai_next;      // linked list, next node
};

struct sockaddr {
    unsigned short    sa_family;    // address family, AF_xxx
    char              sa_data[14];  // 14 bytes of protocol address
};

Crowman Crowman · Accepted Answer · 2014-05-01T02:43:03

struct addrinfo is returned by getaddrinfo(), and contains, on success, a linked list of such structs for a specified hostname and/or service.

The ai_addr member isn't actually a struct sockaddr, because that struct is merely a generic one that contains common members for all the others, and is used in order to determine what type of struct you actually have. Depending upon what you pass to getaddrinfo(), and what that function found out, ai_addr might actually be a pointer to struct sockaddr_in, or struct sockaddr_in6, or whatever else, depending upon what is appropriate for that particular address entry. This is one good reason why they're kept "separate", because that member might point to one of a bunch of different types of structs, which it couldn't do if you tried to hardcode all the members into struct addrinfo, because those different structs have different members.

This is probably the easiest way to get this information if you have a hostname, but it's not the only way. For an IPv4 connection, you can just populate a struct sockaddr_in structure yourself, if you want to and you have the data to do so, and avoid going through the rigamarole of calling getaddrinfo(), which you might have to wait for if it needs to go out into the internet to collect the information for you. You don't have to use struct addrinfo at all.

What is the difference between struct addrinfo and struct sockaddr

1 Answers