Debugging Netlink Requests

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This week I was working on a Kubernetes networking problem. Basically our container network backend was reporting that it couldn’t delete routes, and we didn’t know why.

I started reading the code that was failing, and it was using a library called “netlink”. I’d never heard of that before this week.

Wikipedia says:

Netlink socket family is a Linux kernel interface used for inter-process communication (IPC) between both the kernel and userspace processes, and between different userspace processes, in a way similar to the Unix domain sockets.

The program I was debugging was creating/deleting routes from the route table. 

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