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IMO it was just a relatable example of a somewhat extensive user of netlink that demonstrates compatibility. Some folks may want to run it under the Linuxolator, which seems reasonable.

I only have limited knowledge about netlink, all coming from a devsummit presentation by Alexander, but it seems like an actually good generic kernel interface to have.

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It really isn't. It's like someone wanted to add protobufs for kernel interfaces, but everything has not one tenth of the usability. In fact it's the kind of thing someone would design who wanted to make it's use in C maximally painful and error prone.

Working with both netlink and protobufs in C for 10+ years, I gotta say the latter is much more painful than the former. Error prone I would agree though, mostly because it's too easy to implement netlink… and get it wrong in the process.

NB: my experience specifically relates to C. Protobuf's bindings to other languages are better.

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