An analysis of the netlink protocol and its application

摘要

The mac80211 stack can be used by IEEE 802.11 softMAC wireless devices that expect the MAC layer to be implemented in software. Now more and more wireless devices' drivers have been changed into mac80211 stack based architecture. The communication mechanism between user space and mac80211 stack is based on the netlink protocol. In this paper, by taking mac80211 stack as an example, generic use and also the internal implementation of the netlink protocol are analysed. On the other hand, in order to make full use of a netlink protocol based application, e.g. mac80211 stack, it is necessary to figure out the implementation details of the netlink protocol. Consequently, this paper provides a use case of a netlink protocol, and may greatly reduce the complexity of raw use of the netlink protocol. In this paper, the analysis is based on the Linux kernel 3.9.