This section describes the details of the protocols and socket naming conventions used in the Internet namespace.
Originally the Internet namespace used only IP version 4 (IPv4). With the growing number of hosts on the Internet, a new protocol with a larger address space was necessary: IP version 6 (IPv6). IPv6 introduces besides 128bit addresses (IPv4 has 32bit addresses) also other features and will eventually replace IPv4.
To create a socket in the IPv4 Internet namespace, use the symbolic name
PF_INET
of this namespace as the namespace argument to
socket
or socketpair
. For IPv6 addresses, you need the
macro PF_INET6
. These macros are defined in `sys/socket.h'.
A socket address for the Internet namespace includes the following components:
You must ensure that the address and port number are represented in a canonical format called network byte order. See section Byte Order Conversion, for information about this.
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