knetstat: checking socket options on Linux

published 2017-06-11

A few weeks ago I was debugging network code, and I needed to check if some sockets were bound with SO_REUSEADDR and/or SO_REUSEPORT. I researched how I could inspect that, and was surprised to find out that the Linux kernel did not expose those options to userland.

Thankfully, there is a kernel module called knetstat [1] which lets you do this very easily by adding new files into procfs. When I found it it only supported TCP, but I needed the information for UDP as well so I contributed the code [2] to support it.

If you write networking code on Linux or just run servers, I encourage you to check it out. It is a nice little tool that can come very handy in some situations, including when you need to check options like SO_{RCV,SND}BUF.

=> 1: https://github.com/veithen/knetstat | 2: https://github.com/veithen/knetstat/pull/11