firewalld is a firewall management tool for Linux operating systems. It provides firewall features by acting as a front-end for the Linux kernel’s netfilter framework via the nftables userspace utility (before v0.6.0 iptables backend), acting as an alternative to the nft command line program. The name firewalld adheres to the Unix convention of naming system daemons by appending the letter “d”.
firewalld is written in Python.
Daemon
In multitasking computer operating systems, a daemon is a computer program that runs as a background process, rather than being under the direct control of an interactive user. Traditionally, the process names of a daemon end with the letter d, for clarification that the process is in fact a daemon, and for differentiation between a daemon and a normal computer program. For example, syslogd is a daemon that implements system logging facility, and sshd is a daemon that serves incoming SSH connections.
Firewalld Documentation
Netfilter
Netfilter is a framework provided by the Linux kernel that allows various networking-related operations to be implemented in the form of customized handlers. Netfilter offers various functions and operations for packet filtering, network address translation, and port translation, which provide the functionality required for directing packets through a network and prohibiting packets from reaching sensitive locations within a network.
Netfilter represents a set of hooks inside the Linux kernel, allowing specific kernel modules to register callback functions with the kernel’s networking stack. Those functions, usually applied to the traffic in the form of filtering and modification rules, are called for every packet that traverses the respective hook within the networking stack.
