developing a firewall

[reachtechnocrat]

I find too many things like - divert sockets, raw sockets, netfilter etc.,

Is there a big picture that shows where they all fit ?

I intend to develop a firewall driver that has the ability to examine inbound and outbound packets and allow/drop them in a stateful way.

I do not want to use iptables rather write my own driver that hooks my logic to the fate of the packets.

Any pointers ?

[reachtechnocrat]

It is looking like a "closed source" system - Having no responses suggests this.