I am implementing a library/utility which basically encompasses the features of the traditional route utilities and those of newer tools (like ip from iproute2), which are mostly specific to a particular kernel. The overpowering objective is to make the library/utility work uniformly across all different kernels, so that programs like NetworkManager have a portable library/utility to use instead of the Linux-kernel specific ip which is now being used.

I was going through the FreeBSD and NetBSD documentation and the FreeBSD sources of netstat and route. I was suprised to see that while NetBSD's route implementation has a 'show' command, FreeBSD does not offer any such thing. Moreover it seems that one can not read the entire routing table using the PF_ROUTE sockets and RTM_GET returns information pertaining to only one destination. This suprised me because one can do such a thing with the Linux kernel's RTNETLINK.

Is there a reason why this is so? Or is reading from /dev/kmem the only way to get a dump of the routing tables?

Thanks, Debarshi