From: Fernando Fernandez Mancera Date: Mon, 9 Mar 2026 02:39:45 +0000 (+0100) Subject: inet: add ip_local_port_step_width sysctl to improve port usage distribution X-Git-Url: http://git.ipfire.org/gitweb.cgi?a=commitdiff_plain;h=7da62262ec96a4b345d207b6bcd2ddf5231b7f7d;p=thirdparty%2Fkernel%2Flinux.git inet: add ip_local_port_step_width sysctl to improve port usage distribution With the current port selection algorithm, ports after a reserved port range or long time used port are used more often than others [1]. This causes an uneven port usage distribution. This combines with cloud environments blocking connections between the application server and the database server if there was a previous connection with the same source port, leading to connectivity problems between applications on cloud environments. The real issue here is that these firewalls cannot cope with standards-compliant port reuse. This is a workaround for such situations and an improvement on the distribution of ports selected. The proposed solution is to implement a variant of RFC 6056 Algorithm 5. The step size is selected randomly on every connect() call ensuring it is a coprime with respect to the size of the range of ports we want to scan. This way, we can ensure that all ports within the range are scanned before returning an error. To enable this algorithm, the user must configure the new sysctl option "net.ipv4.ip_local_port_step_width". In addition, on graphs generated we can observe that the distribution of source ports is more even with the proposed approach. [2] [1] https://0xffsoftware.com/port_graph_current_alg.html [2] https://0xffsoftware.com/port_graph_random_step_alg.html Reviewed-by: Eric Dumazet Signed-off-by: Fernando Fernandez Mancera Link: https://patch.msgid.link/20260309023946.5473-2-fmancera@suse.de Signed-off-by: Jakub Kicinski --- diff --git a/Documentation/networking/ip-sysctl.rst b/Documentation/networking/ip-sysctl.rst index 265158534cda5..2e3a746fcc6da 100644 --- a/Documentation/networking/ip-sysctl.rst +++ b/Documentation/networking/ip-sysctl.rst @@ -1630,6 +1630,22 @@ ip_local_reserved_ports - list of comma separated ranges Default: Empty +ip_local_port_step_width - INTEGER + Defines the numerical maximum increment between successive port + allocations within the ephemeral port range when an unavailable port is + reached. This can be used to mitigate accumulated nodes in port + distribution when reserved ports have been configured. Please note that + port collisions may be more frequent in a system with a very high load. + + It is recommended to set this value strictly larger than the largest + contiguous block of ports configure in ip_local_reserved_ports. For + large reserved port ranges, setting this to 3x or 4x the size of the + largest block is advised. Using a value equal or greater than the local + port range size completely solves the uneven port distribution problem, + but it can degrade performance under port exhaustion situations. + + Default: 0 (disabled) + ip_unprivileged_port_start - INTEGER This is a per-namespace sysctl. It defines the first unprivileged port in the network namespace. Privileged ports diff --git a/Documentation/networking/net_cachelines/netns_ipv4_sysctl.rst b/Documentation/networking/net_cachelines/netns_ipv4_sysctl.rst index beaf1880a19bf..cf284263e69b7 100644 --- a/Documentation/networking/net_cachelines/netns_ipv4_sysctl.rst +++ b/Documentation/networking/net_cachelines/netns_ipv4_sysctl.rst @@ -52,6 +52,7 @@ u8 sysctl_ip_fwd_update_priority u8 sysctl_ip_nonlocal_bind u8 sysctl_ip_autobind_reuse u8 sysctl_ip_dynaddr +u32 sysctl_ip_local_port_step_width u8 sysctl_ip_early_demux read_mostly ip(6)_rcv_finish_core u8 sysctl_raw_l3mdev_accept u8 sysctl_tcp_early_demux read_mostly ip(6)_rcv_finish_core diff --git a/include/net/netns/ipv4.h b/include/net/netns/ipv4.h index 38624beff9b34..80ccd4dda8e0f 100644 --- a/include/net/netns/ipv4.h +++ b/include/net/netns/ipv4.h @@ -166,6 +166,7 @@ struct netns_ipv4 { u8 sysctl_ip_autobind_reuse; /* Shall we try to damage output packets if routing dev changes? */ u8 sysctl_ip_dynaddr; + u32 sysctl_ip_local_port_step_width; #ifdef CONFIG_NET_L3_MASTER_DEV u8 sysctl_raw_l3mdev_accept; #endif diff --git a/net/ipv4/inet_hashtables.c b/net/ipv4/inet_hashtables.c index ac7b67c603b57..13310c72b0bf4 100644 --- a/net/ipv4/inet_hashtables.c +++ b/net/ipv4/inet_hashtables.c @@ -16,6 +16,7 @@ #include #include #include +#include #include #include @@ -1057,12 +1058,12 @@ int __inet_hash_connect(struct inet_timewait_death_row *death_row, struct net *net = sock_net(sk); struct inet_bind2_bucket *tb2; struct inet_bind_bucket *tb; + int step, scan_step, l3mdev; + u32 index, max_rand_step; bool tb_created = false; u32 remaining, offset; int ret, i, low, high; bool local_ports; - int step, l3mdev; - u32 index; if (port) { local_bh_disable(); @@ -1076,6 +1077,8 @@ int __inet_hash_connect(struct inet_timewait_death_row *death_row, local_ports = inet_sk_get_local_port_range(sk, &low, &high); step = local_ports ? 1 : 2; + scan_step = step; + max_rand_step = READ_ONCE(net->ipv4.sysctl_ip_local_port_step_width); high++; /* [32768, 60999] -> [32768, 61000[ */ remaining = high - low; @@ -1094,9 +1097,28 @@ int __inet_hash_connect(struct inet_timewait_death_row *death_row, */ if (!local_ports) offset &= ~1U; + + if (max_rand_step && remaining > 1) { + u32 range = remaining / step; + u32 upper_bound; + + upper_bound = min(range, max_rand_step); + scan_step = get_random_u32_inclusive(1, upper_bound); + while (gcd(scan_step, range) != 1) { + scan_step++; + /* if both scan_step and range are even gcd won't be 1 */ + if (!(scan_step & 1) && !(range & 1)) + scan_step++; + if (unlikely(scan_step > upper_bound)) { + scan_step = 1; + break; + } + } + scan_step *= step; + } other_parity_scan: port = low + offset; - for (i = 0; i < remaining; i += step, port += step) { + for (i = 0; i < remaining; i += step, port += scan_step) { if (unlikely(port >= high)) port -= remaining; if (inet_is_local_reserved_port(net, port)) diff --git a/net/ipv4/sysctl_net_ipv4.c b/net/ipv4/sysctl_net_ipv4.c index 5654cc9c8a0b9..d8bdb1bdbff17 100644 --- a/net/ipv4/sysctl_net_ipv4.c +++ b/net/ipv4/sysctl_net_ipv4.c @@ -823,6 +823,13 @@ static struct ctl_table ipv4_net_table[] = { .mode = 0644, .proc_handler = ipv4_local_port_range, }, + { + .procname = "ip_local_port_step_width", + .maxlen = sizeof(u32), + .data = &init_net.ipv4.sysctl_ip_local_port_step_width, + .mode = 0644, + .proc_handler = proc_douintvec, + }, { .procname = "ip_local_reserved_ports", .data = &init_net.ipv4.sysctl_local_reserved_ports,