There are a lot of nice things with netlink. This provides a unified interface to the whole networking stack, where everything is consistent. To me, the main a

There are a lot of nice things with netlink. This provides a unified interface to the whole networking stack, where everything is consistent. To me, the main advantage of netlink is the multicast mode, where you can subscribe to certain class of events. e.g. route add, neighbor add, etc. Also, a lot of linux software for the networking domain interfaces with netlink, so they gain freebsd compatibility for, well, free. For example, you get FRR compat now.