During the lifetime of an IPv4 datagram inside the Linux kernel, one important step is the route lookup for the destination address through the fib_lookup() function. From essential information about the datagram (source and destination IP addresses, interfaces, firewall mark, …), this function should quickly provide a decision. Some possible options are:
- local delivery (
RTN_LOCAL), - forwarding to a supplied next hop (
RTN_UNICAST), - silent discard (
RTN_BLACKHOLE).
Since 2.6.39, Linux stores routes into a compressed prefix tree (commit 3630b7c050d9). In the past, a route cache was maintained but it has been removed1 in Linux 3.6.
