The Firewall Doesn't Live in the Kernel

Author makes a point that since (rather complex) firewall configuration parsing is all in userland, we can't say that the firewall lives in the kernel.

Disagree - practically every single kernel feature is configured from userland. Kernel provides filesystem, but userland calls "mount". Kernel routes packets, but userland sets up interfaces. Even something as direct as loading a device driver is now mediated by udev in userland. And yet, we say that filesystems, routing and device drives all live in the kernel.

(Also a note to the author on the post itself: it seems like the post is unsure what its purpose is. It could be a cool overview of how firewall config works, or a thought piece about configuration boundaries, or warning about unexpected interaction between kernel and privileged daemons... but right now it's kinda a mix of all of those and it makes it a bit hard to read. Maybe trust LLMs less and apply more human guidance when writing the posts?)

Having any of the firewall in the kernel is one Linuxism I've never understood. I tried to set up an old computer as a VPN server, and I had to recompile the kernel or switch distributions, because the kernel wasn't compiled with a packet processing feature I wanted to use.

Author here.

This came out of building a structured fuzzer around libnftnl and trying to understand where firewall semantics actually get fixed in the stack.

Curious how this lines up with others’ mental models of nftables.