'How do SO_REUSEADDR and SO_REUSEPORT differ?

The man pages and programmer documentations for the socket options SO_REUSEADDR and SO_REUSEPORT are different for different operating systems and often highly confusing. Some operating systems don't even have the option SO_REUSEPORT. The WEB is full of contradicting information regarding this subject and often you can find information that is only true for one socket implementation of a specific operating system, which may not even be explicitly mentioned in the text.

So how exactly is SO_REUSEADDR different than SO_REUSEPORT?

Are systems without SO_REUSEPORT more limited?

And what exactly is the expected behavior if I use either one on different operating systems?

linuxwindowssocketsunixportability


Solution 1:[1]

Mecki's answer is absolutly perfect, but it's worth adding that FreeBSD also supports SO_REUSEPORT_LB, which mimics Linux' SO_REUSEPORT behaviour - it balances the load; see setsockopt(2)

Sources

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Source: Stack Overflow

Solution Source
Solution 1 Edward Tomasz Napierala

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