Rtnelink and notifcations: a question.

[Andy Johnson <johnsonzjo@gmail.com>]

Hello,

This is a theoretical question (sorry,-)). I was wondering why do we
need both rtnetlink
kernel sockets and the notification API ?
For example,
in net/core/dev.c,
we use notification to send NETDEV_REGISTER event notification in:
call_netdevice_notifiers(NETDEV_REGISTER, dev);
and we use the rtnetlink to send RTM_NEWLINK message:
rtmsg_ifinfo(RTM_NEWLINK,...);


Is it possible to use only the rtnetlink API and to send events like
NETDEV_REGISTER with rtnetlink methods ?

Or is there something inherent with rtnetlink/notification that
prevents implementing in
this way ?

I believe that the other way (solely using notification API) is not
possible because
we need to support getting messages
from userspace (for example, with the iproute package).



Regards,
Andy