raw socket question

Hi,
For delivering packets to a raw socket ,port id is not checked , why
is it so ... Instead of delivering the packet to all the protocols ,we
could have delivered to only an application owning the port ... anyone
shed some light on this .

cheers
sinbad

On Aug 29, 11:45 am, sinbad <sinbad.sin...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> For delivering packets to a raw socket ,port id is not checked , why
> is it so ... Instead of delivering the packet to all the protocols ,we
> could have delivered to only an application owning the port ... anyone
> shed some light on this .
>

Port only makes sense for IP. Other protocols may or may not have a
concept of "port" and even if they do the "port" definition for a
protocol like AppleTalk or DECnet may not be compatible with the
concept of "port" in IP. Since the reason for using raw sockets in the
first place is to interface with protocols other than TCP/IP or UDP/IP
it doesn't make sense to check port id.