Network Configuration Libraries

FreeBSD has high quality tools for the management of the network, which includes tools to configure and manage interfaces, the firewalls and more. However these tools are not available as libraries, any software that wishes to incorporate network management must shell out to the command line tools. This limits the range of possible tools for automating control of a FreeBSD system. The aim of this project is to develop some of the libraries which would enable the programmatic configuration/management of network interfaces, packet filtering and routing. An example use case of these libraries would be to enable a bhyve VM to be bridged to the host’s ethernet network programmatically and similar benefits can be harvested for the jails as well.

The libraries that will be created as a part of this project are:

• /lib/libroute: For programmatic manipulation/management of routing
• /lib/libipfw: For programmatic packet filtering and NATing.