Maintaining and distributing relevant routing information base updates to subscribing clients in a device

Route changes are processed and filtered to notify a client of those routing updates of interest to a client. In one configuration, a set of network addresses are received from a client indicating route updates of interest to the client and a set of types of routing changes that are of interest. One or more data structures are accordingly populated with this information. In response to receiving a route update, one or more lookup operations are performed on the data structure to identify whether this particular route is of interest to a particular client and/or whether any route dependent on the particular route are of interest to a client. The client is notified of the changes of interest. In one embodiment, the type of change to a route is also matched against a set of types of routing changes that are of interest, and a client is only notified if the change to a route of interest also matches a type of routing change of interest.