Comment by JdeBP

There's nothing stopping it. systemd doesn't do anything particularly special when opening a datagram socket that magically prevents it from receiving broadcast datagrams. There's no difference between Kea opening the socket and systemd opening the socket, except that systemd can do it and then drop privileges before Kea is loaded and run.

Or could do it.

If it weren't that Kea has no mechanism for taking and just using an already-open socket.

Remember that Accept in a socket unit has no meaning for ListenDatagram sockets. There's no waiting for incoming connections before activation going on.

If you're asking about the detailed internals of what systemd does with BPF and how that meshes with what Kea does, then I leave that to be answered by the systemd and Kea people. (-: