On Wed, 27 May 2020 15:14:41 +0200 Emanuele Giuseppe Esposito wrote:

Regarding the config, as I said the idea is to gather multiple 
subsystems' statistics, therefore there wouldn't be a single 
configuration method like in netlink.
For example in kvm there are file descriptors for configuration, and 
creating them requires no privilege, contrary to the network interfaces.

Enumerating networking interfaces, addresses, and almost all of the
configuration requires no extra privilege. In fact I'd hope that
whatever daemon collects network stats doesn't run as root :)

I think enumerating objects is of primary importance, and statistics 
of those objects are subordinate.

Again, I have little KVM knowledge, but BPF also uses a fd-based API,
and carries stats over the same syscall interface.