mirror-linux/include
Fernando Fernandez Mancera 7da62262ec 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 <edumazet@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Fernando Fernandez Mancera <fmancera@suse.de>
Link: https://patch.msgid.link/20260309023946.5473-2-fmancera@suse.de
Signed-off-by: Jakub Kicinski <kuba@kernel.org>
2026-03-10 18:59:39 -07:00
..
acpi mailbox: platform and core updates 2026-02-14 11:13:32 -08:00
asm-generic hyperv-next for v7.0 2026-02-20 08:48:31 -08:00
clocksource
crypto Networking changes for 7.0 2026-02-11 19:31:52 -08:00
cxl
drm drm/pagemap: pass pagemap_addr by reference 2026-02-17 19:39:44 -05:00
dt-bindings phy-for-7.0 2026-02-17 11:40:04 -08:00
hyperv hyperv-next for v7.0 2026-02-20 08:48:31 -08:00
keys
kunit treewide: Replace kmalloc with kmalloc_obj for non-scalar types 2026-02-21 01:02:28 -08:00
kvm
linux tcp: move tp->chrono_type next tp->chrono_stat[] 2026-03-09 19:33:43 -07:00
math-emu
media [GIT PULL for v7.0] media updates 2026-02-11 12:20:25 -08:00
memory
misc
net inet: add ip_local_port_step_width sysctl to improve port usage distribution 2026-03-10 18:59:39 -07:00
pcmcia
ras
rdma RDMA/core: Check id_priv->restricted_node_type in cma_listen_on_dev() 2026-02-25 07:50:10 -05:00
rv rv: Fix multiple definition of __pcpu_unique_da_mon_this 2026-02-20 13:12:00 +01:00
scsi SCSI misc on 20260212 2026-02-12 15:43:02 -08:00
soc
sound ASoC: Updates for v7.0 2026-02-09 17:39:11 +01:00
target
trace Merge git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/netdev/net 2026-03-05 12:11:05 -08:00
uapi inet_diag: report delayed ack timer information 2026-03-06 16:32:26 -08:00
ufs
vdso
video
xen
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