Is bpf a part of IPFW, or am I confused?

[Charles Swiger]

On Jan 5, 2005, at 3:09 PM, Andreas Davour wrote:
> I have searched the handbook and the manpages and not really 
> understood the role of bpf. Is it supposed to be enabled when I use 
> IPFW or is it another beast altogether, best left undisturbed?

The BPF, or Berkeley Packet Filter, is really intended for use by 
userland applications which want to perform network analysis and packet 
filtering.  IPFW and the other firewalls for FreeBSD are written as 
kernel modules and thus deal with the network stack directly.

The current DHCP implementation (ISC's dhcpd and dhclient programs) 
depends on BPF to work, so I would be cautious about removing it from 
your kernel unless you are sure you won't need it.

-- 
-Chuck