Who sent the message?

Often a server will need to know who sent it a message. There are a number of reasons for this:

• accounting
• access control
• context association
• class of service
• compatibility
• etc.

It would be cumbersome (and a security hole) to have the client provide this information with each and every message sent. Therefore, there's a structure filled in by the kernel whenever the MsgReceive() function unblocks because it got a message. This structure is of type struct _msg_info, and contains the following:

struct _msg_info
{
    uint32_t  nd;
    uint32_t  srcnd;
    pid_t     pid;
    int32_t   tid;
    int32_t   chid;
    int32_t   scoid;
    int32_t   coid;
    int16_t   priority;
    int16_t   flags;
    ssize64_t msglen;
    ssize64_t srcmsglen;
    ssize64_t dstmsglen;
};

You pass it to the MsgReceive() function as the last argument. If you pass a NULL, then nothing happens. (The information can be retrieved later via the MsgInfo() call, so it's not gone forever!)

Let's look at the fields:

nd, srcnd, pid, and tid

Node Descriptors, process ID, and thread ID of the client. (Note that nd is the receiving node's node descriptor for the transmitting node; srcnd is the transmitting node's node descriptor for the receiving node. There's a very good reason for this :-), which we'll see below in “Some notes on NDs.”)

priority

The priority of the sending thread.

chid, coid

Channel ID that the message was sent to, and the connection ID used.

scoid

Server Connection ID. This is an internal identifier used by the kernel to route the message from the server back to the client. You don't need to know about it, except for the interesting fact that it will be a small integer that uniquely represents the client.

flags

Contains a variety of flag bits, including the following:

• _NTO_MI_BITS_64 and _NTO_MI_BITS_DIFF tell you that the sender is using a 64-bit architecture, or a different word-size architecture than you're using.
• _NTO_MI_ENDIAN_BIG and _NTO_MI_ENDIAN_DIFF tell you about the endian-ness of the sending machine (in case the message came over the network from a machine with a different endian-ness).
• _NTO_MI_NET_CRED_DIRTY is used internally.
• We'll look at _NTO_MI_UNBLOCK_REQ in the section “Using the _NTO_MI_UNBLOCK_REQ,” below.

If you determine that your program is incompatible with the sender, you can return an error such as ENOTSUP. See “Replying with no data, or an errno” later in this chapter.

msglen

Number of bytes received.

srcmsglen

The length of the source message, in bytes, as sent by the client. This may be greater than the value in msglen, as would be the case when receiving less data than what was sent.

dstmsglen

The length of the client's reply buffer, in bytes.