Netlink in FreeBSD

• Student: Sean Ng (seanngpengnam@gmail.com)
• Mentor: Alexander V. Chernikov (melifaro@)

Refer to https://github.com/pengnam/freebsd-netlink for project details

Netlink is a linux kernel interface used for communication between userspace and kernel processes.

This project aims to port Netlink over to FreeBSD. The goal is to implement NETLINK_ROUTE in FreeBSD, and eventually support NETLINK_GENERIC as well. Eventually, the project aims to have a program use netlink. Currently, systems in FreeBSD which use Netlink sockets in their equivalent implementations in linux are currently supported by routing sockets.

To implement Netlink for NETLINK_ROUTE, the development process will broken into three main stages:

1. Constructing basic interfaces
   1. Registering handlers with socket: Register handler with socket API for AF_NETLINK address family
   2. Configuring code as a configurable module

1. Interact with the routing subsystem
   1. Message passing, message translating to an internal format, passing the code into a route subsystem
   2. Replying with confirmation

1. Hack net/frr or net/bird2 to use netlink support

1. Implement basic interfaces for netlink socket connection and message sending [DONE]
2. Interact with the routing subsystem to implement NETLINK_ROUTE functionalities [DONE]
3. Extend to NETLINK_GENERIC [PARTIALLY DONE]

• June 8th: Start of GSOC
  • Check out previous work done, try compiling (X)
  • Get a working example
• July 13th - July 17th: Mid-term Evaluations #1
• August 6th: End of coding (soft)
  • Remaining time used for documentation
• August 14th: End of coding (hard)

Netlink: https://github.com/pengnam/freebsd-netlink (https://github.com/pengnam/freebsd-netlink/pull/1) Userspace Library: https://github.com/pengnam/libmnl-freebsd

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oJSueoRWLDq9T9aLoYQzJGskPv7xiPCNG0iv8obwfGE/ https://github.com/pengnam/netlink-notes