linuxtcpnonblocking

Are TCP socket send and receive thread-safe on Linux?

In Linux, if I create two threads, one for TCP send data and one for TCP receive data for the same nonblocking socket, is it thread safe?

Or should I synchronise using a mutex?

Solution

  • It's absolutely fine. There's already a mutex or equivalent synchronization inside the read/write/send/recv etc. library functions.

    These functions for working with sockets are all from the POSIX.1-2008 standard.

    If you check man 7 pthreads, it says that

    POSIX.1-2001 and POSIX.1-2008 require that all functions specified in the standard shall be thread-safe, except for ...

    (... there follows a list of functions which you can confirm you don't care about).