Understanding Linux Network Internals

Chapter 3. User-Space-to-Kernel Interface

In this chapter, I’ll briefly introduce the main mechanisms that user-space applications can use to communicate with the kernel or read information exported by it. We will not look at the details of their implementations, because each mechanism would deserve a chapter of its own. The purpose of this chapter is to give you enough pointers to the code and to external documentation so that you can further investigate the topic if interested. For example, with this chapter, you have the information you need to find how and where a given directory is added to /proc, kernel handler which processes a given ioctl command, and what functions are provided by Netlink, currently the preferred interface for user-space network configuration.

This chapter focuses only on the mechanisms that I will often mention in the book when talking about the interface between the user-space configuration commands such as ifconfig and route and the kernel handlers that apply the requested configurations. For an analysis of the generic messaging systems available for intrakernel communication as well as kernel-to-user-space communication, please refer to Understanding the Linux Kernel (O’Reilly).

The discussion of each feature in this book ends with a set of sections that show how user-space configuration tools and the kernel communicate. The information in this chapter can help you understand those sections better.

Overview

The kernel exports internal information to user ...