Part VII. Routing

Layer three protocols, such as IP, must find out how to reach the system that is supposed to receive each packet. The recipient could be in the cubicle next door or halfway around the world. When more than one network is involved, the L3 layer is responsible for figuring out the most efficient route (so far as that is feasible) and for directing the message toward the next system along that route, also called the next hop. This process is called routing, and it plays a central role in the Linux networking code. Here is what is covered in each chapter:

Chapter 30 Routing: Concepts

Introduces the functionality that a basic router, and therefore the Linux kernel, must provide.

Chapter 31 Routing: Advanced

Introduces optional features the user can enable to configure routing in more complex scenarios. Among them we will see policy routing and multipath routing. We will also look at the other subsystems routing interacts with.

Chapter 32 Routing: Linux Implementation

Gives you an overview of the main data structures used by the routing code, describes the initialization of the routing subsystem, and shows the interactions between the routing subsystem and other kernel subsystems.

Chapter 33 Routing: The Routing Cache

Describes the routing cache, including the protocol-independent cache (destination cache, or DST). The description covers how elements are inserted and deleted from the cache, along with the garbage collection and lookup algorithms.

Chapter 34 Routing: ...

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