Netlink is pretty much as good as it gets here. It is explicitly designed as improvement over ioctl mess > Netlink is often described as an ioctl() replacement

Netlink is pretty much as good as it gets here. It is explicitly designed as improvement over ioctl mess > Netlink is often described as an ioctl() replacement. It aims to replace fixed-format C structures as supplied to ioctl() with a format which allows an easy way to add or extended the arguments.