2007
09.17

The Great Big Linux Black Hole

Category: Linux, Technology / Tags: no tag / Add Comment

Multicast in Linux is a GREAT BIG BLACK HOLE. There is no suitable documentation on it. What I’ve found is many years old, for the 2.0/2.2/2.4 kernel tree or in reference to getting Linux to route multicast packets. The best doc I’ve found is by Juan-Mariano de Goyeneche – from 1998!

Additionally, there are little to no user-space tools for working with multicast. You can use ‘netstat’ to see what multicast groups the host is subscribed to and the number of subscribers…other than that, you are powerless to do anything. What would be nice would be tools to:

  • list the subscribers (by process ID and socket number (since an app can subscribe to multiple multicast groups)
  • detach a subscriber from a group, something akin to “kill -9 PID:socket_number”
  • see the traffic stats for each multicast subscription

Linux is definitely lacking in the multicast department.

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