Illustration of the usage of netlink sockets with an example

The example shown below is taken from zebra, a GNU licensed package used to configure a linux box as a router. The zebra and iproute2 packages are excellent sources to understand how netlink sockets work and how they interact with the kernel. This section just provides a starting point to understand the basic data structures involved, for furthur details, code walkthrough of zebra and iproute2 is recommended.