netlink

In 2014 I wrote about the state of Linux network configuration, lamenting the proliferation of netlink libraries and how most projects hadn’t progressed past shell scripting and iproute2. I concluded that “there is a need for a good netlink library for one of the popular scripting languages.”

A decade later, that library exists. More importantly, the ecosystem has matured enough that every major language has a credible netlink option - and production systems are using them.

To compare them, I’ll use the same example throughout: create a bridge, a network namespace, and a veth pair connecting them.