The essential differences between
firewalld
and the
iptables service are:
The iptables service stores configuration in /etc/sysconfig/iptables
while firewalld
stores it in various XML files in /usr/lib/firewalld/
and /etc/firewalld/
. Note that the /etc/sysconfig/iptables
file does not exist as firewalld
is installed be default on Fedora.
With the iptables service, every single change means flushing all the old rules and reading all the new rules from /etc/sysconfig/iptables
while with firewalld
there is no re-creating of all the rules; only the differences are applied. Consequently, firewalld
can change the settings during run time without existing connections being lost.
Both use
iptables tool to talk to the kernel packet filter.