Undocumented IPv6 options

Hello netdev,

Andrew McDonald kindly fixed the description of IPV6_ROUTER_ALERT in the ipv7.7 man page. As long as we're on the topic, I'll point out that the following IPV6 options (and possibly others) are still not documented on that page:

IPV6_CHECKSUM
IPV6_JOIN_ANYCAST
IPV6_LEAVE_ANYCAST
IPV6_V6ONLY
IPV6_RECVPKTINFO
IPV6_2292PKTINFO

Can anyone help with documenting any of these please?

Cheers,

Michael

Michael Kerrisk
maintainer of Linux man pages Sections 2, 3, 4, 5, and 7

Want to help with man page maintenance?  Grab the latest tarball at
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/manpages/
read the HOWTOHELP file and grep the source files for 'FIXME'.

RFC 2553 was obsoleted by RFC 3493, and it added IPV6_V6ONLY into Basic API.

RFC 2292 (IPV6 Advanced API) defines IPV6_CHECKSUM, and IPV6_PKTINFO (latter of which is known above as IPV6_2292PKTINFO)

RFC 3542 obsoletes RFC 2292, and defines IPV6_RECVPKTINFO, and modifies IPV6_PKTINFO.

The IPV6_JOIN_ANYCAST and IPV6_LEAVE_ANYCAST are not defined in any RFC.

Undocumented are also IPV6_JOIN_GROUP and IPV6_LEAVE_GROUP (RFC 2553 / 3493)

It really looks like time for major overhaul of that (and related) man-pages is needed...

/Matti Aarnio

The IPv6 man page was never complete when I wrote it long ago.

This

BUGS
...
This man page is not complete.

is still true.

IPv6 just needs finishing.

One option actually since the RFCs document IPv6 basic and extended API very well would be to somehow pull them in similar to the POSIX manpages and let them speak for themselves.

I don't know if that is possible with the RFC copyrights though (?)

-Andi

Yes. Andi Kleen did a good job of putting some pages together in the 2.2 timeframe, but no-one else carried on the work since then, and there is much that sould be updated in the *.7 networking pages.

Cheers,

Michael