README.md

netlink-rs

This project aims at providing building blocks for the netlink protocol (see man 7 netlink).

The netlink protocol is huge but the two most widely used subprotocols are the generic netlink protocol and the route netlink protocol (see man 7 rtnetlink).

The project is in its early stages, and I'm currently focusing on the route and audit netlink protocols.

Documentation

• rtnetlink
• audit

Organization

• the netlink_sys crate provides netlink sockets. Integration with mio and tokio is optional.
• the netlink_packet crate defines the netlink messages, and method for serializing and deserializing them.
• the netlink_proto crate provides the Tokio integration.
• the rtnetlink crate provides higher level abstraction for the route protocol (see man 7 rtnetlink). This is probably what users want to use, if they want to manipulate IP addresses, route tables, etc.
• the audit crate provides higher level abstractions for the audit protocol.

Other netlink projects in rust

Before starting working on this library, I've checked a bunch of other projects but none seems to be really complete.

• https://github.com/achanda/netlink: rust bindings for netlink. Does not seem very usable as is, and does not seem to be developped anymore.
• https://github.com/polachok/pnetlink: very similar to this project, but built on to of libpnet. The author seems to be more knowledgeable about netlink than I am. It also has broader coverage of the route netlink protocol (support for the RTM_{NEW,DEL,GET}ROUTE and RTM_{NEW,DEL,GET}ADDRESS messages). However, many attributes supported by rtnetlink are not covered.
• https://github.com/crhino/netlink-rs: rust bindings for libnl. Very incomplete and not developed.
• https://github.com/jbaublitz/neli: generic netlink protocol. Pretty recent project, actively developed.
• https://github.com/carrotsrc/rsnl: bindings for libnl. Maintained but not actively developed.
• https://github.com/TaborKelly/nl-utils: a netlink packet parser. The goal is not that same than this project.

Other non-rust netlink projects

• libnl: netlink implementation in C. Very complete with awesome documentation.
• pyroute2: a very complete and readable implementation in pure python.
• netlink: a very complete and very actively maintained go project, seems to be widely used.

Credits

My main resource so far has been the source code of pyroute2 and netlink a lot. These two projects are great, and very nicely written. As someone who does not read C fluently, and that does not know much about netlink, they have been invaluable.

I'd also like to praise libnl for its documentation. It helped me a lot in understanding the protocol basics.

The whole packet parsing logic is inspired by @whitequark excellent blog posts (part 1, part 2 and part 3, although I've only really used the concepts described in the first blog post). These ideas are also being used in @m-labs's smoltcp project.

Thanks also to the people behing tokio, especially @carllerche, for the amazing tool they are building, and the support they provide. The project structure and code quality are mind blowing, and some parts of this projects are basically rip-offs from tokio's source code.

Finally, thanks to the Rust community, which helped me in multiple occations.

Other resources I particularly appreciated:

• https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7356
• https://medium.com/@mdlayher/linux-netlink-and-go-part-1-netlink-4781aaeeaca8