intelnetd

intelnetd is a network daemon developed by Intel Corporation for use on embedded Linux platforms. It is optionally included in the Intel Atom System on Chip (SoC) firmware. Loads during init as a background process that manages IPv4 and IPv6 connectivity over the system's Ethernet or Wi‑Fi interfaces. The service exposes a D‑Bus interface, which allows client applications to query link status, obtain IP addresses, and trigger DHCP or IPv6 stateless address autoconfiguration. It supports multicast DNS and neighbor discovery over IPv6. The implementation is written in C and is licensed under the MIT license, making it freely available to open source communities.

Operationally, the daemon runs as root and uses the netlink socket interface to receive link updates from the kernel. It can coexist with alternative networking tools such as NetworkManager; the default configuration re‑routers default routes and metrics so that intelnetd remains primary for network services unless overridden.

Over its lifecycle, several security findings recorded flaws such as integer overflow during parsing of DHCP packets and denial‑of‑service conditions caused by malformed neighbor discovery messages. Intel released patch releases to address these weaknesses. The daemon was later superseded in newer Intel boards by the generic Linux networking stack, and the source code was archived in Intel’s Git repository.

intelnetd remains referenced in legacy documentation and is largely out of use on contemporary Intel-based platforms.