Type safety for the weary netlink user
Rationale
This crate aims to be a pure Rust implementation that defines the necessary constants and wraps them in enums to distinguish between various categories of constants in the context of netlink.
The project is broken down into the following modules:
consts- This is where all of the C-defined constants are wrapped into type safe enums for use in the library.err- This module contains all of the protocol and library-level errors encountered in the code.genl- This code provides parsing for the generic netlink subsystem of the netlink protocol.nlattr- This code provides more granular parsing methods for the generic netlink attributes in the context of generic netlink requests and responses.nl- This is the top level netlink header code that handles the header that all netlink messages are encapsulated in.rtnl- This module is for the routing netlink subsystem of the netlink protocol.socket- This provides a socket structure for use in sending and receiving messages and a number of convenience functions for commonly encountered use cases.
Traits
The library at the top level contains the Nl trait which provides a buffer size calculation
function, a serialization method, and a deserialization method. It also contains
implementations of Nl for common types. The is one additional trait, NlBuf, used in cases
where, to deserialize a type, a buffer needs to be provided by the caller function and passed
to the callee.
Design decisions
This is a fairly low level library that currently does not have a whole lot of higher level
handle-type data structures and relies mostly on the NlSocket struct to provide most of the
convenience functions. I hope to add a higher level API by v0.5.0 to ease some of the
workflows that have been brought to my attention.
The goal of this library is completeness for handling netlink and am working to incorporate features that will make this library easier to use in all use cases. If you have a use case you would like to see supported, please open an issue on github.
Examples
Examples of working code exist in the examples/ subdirectory on Github. They have a separate
Cargo.toml file to provide easy testing and use.
Documentation
Each module has been documented extensively to provide information on how to use the code contained in the module. Pull requests for documentation mistakes, updates, and rewording for clarity is a valuable contribution as this project aims to be as simple to use as possible.