Entire Linux Network stack diagram (2024)
1–10 of 61 posts
Re: Entire Linux Network stack diagram (2024)
#2wow
Re: Entire Linux Network stack diagram (2024)
#3I'm surprised to realize I'm familiar with most of the stack just from decades of Linux usage and no formal study of the stack.
Re: Entire Linux Network stack diagram (2024)
#4This place needs more of this kind of documentation.
I failed to use IP tables for years. I bought books. I copied recipes from blog posts. Nothing made sense, everything I did was brittle. Until I finally found a schematic showing the flowchart of a packet through the kernel, which gives the exact order that each rule chain is applied, and where some of the sysctl values are enforced. All of a sudden, I could write rules that did exactly what I wanted, or intelligently choose between rules that have equivalent behaviors in isolation but which could have different performance implications.
After studying the schematic, every would just work on the first try. A good schematic makes a world of difference!
Re: Entire Linux Network stack diagram (2024)
#5That's pretty cool!
If someone could program a visualization tool that would generate such diagrams automatically, that would be even cooler (but likely a mission impossible).
Re: Entire Linux Network stack diagram (2024)
#6For anyone who is interested, the author of this diagram also made a Linux disk I/O diagram (https://zenodo.org/records/15234151). These diagrams are from his book Operativni sustavi i računalne mreže - Linux u primjeni (https://zenodo.org/records/17371946)
Shout out to the brilliant and generous work of the author!
Re: Entire Linux Network stack diagram (2024)
#7This place needs more of this kind of documentation. I failed to use IP tables for years. I bought books. I copied recipes from blog posts. Nothing made sense, everything I did was brittle. Until I finally found a schematic showing the flowchart of a packet through the kernel, which gives the exact order that each rule chain is applied, and where some of the sysctl values are enforced. All of a sudden, I could write…
Was it this one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File%3aNetfilter-packet-flow.s...
Re: Entire Linux Network stack diagram (2024)
#8This place needs more of this kind of documentation. I failed to use IP tables for years. I bought books. I copied recipes from blog posts. Nothing made sense, everything I did was brittle. Until I finally found a schematic showing the flowchart of a packet through the kernel, which gives the exact order that each rule chain is applied, and where some of the sysctl values are enforced. All of a sudden, I could write…
Can you share the diagram? Would love to become iptables-enlightened.
Re: Entire Linux Network stack diagram (2024)
#9I'm not sure if this takes into account para-virtualized networks on VMs, ie. VMware vm's with "virtual" hardware access
It's been a few years for me tho, so perhaps it's covered with the VM section.
Lovely diagram, thanks for sharing it!
Re: Entire Linux Network stack diagram (2024)
#10This place needs more of this kind of documentation. I failed to use IP tables for years. I bought books. I copied recipes from blog posts. Nothing made sense, everything I did was brittle. Until I finally found a schematic showing the flowchart of a packet through the kernel, which gives the exact order that each rule chain is applied, and where some of the sysctl values are enforced. All of a sudden, I could write…
Can you share the diagram? Would love to become iptables-enlightened.
Eventually I used more detailed diagrams, but this one was like a lightbulb going off:
https://www.frozentux.net/iptables-tutorial/images/tables_tr...
I couldn’t find one that annotated where sysctl configurable were shown. But this is a useful annotation, even if it’s an exercise for the reader.