ipv4: Add interface option to enable routing of 127.0.0.0/8
Routing of 127/8 is tradtionally forbidden, we consider packets from that address block martian when routing and do not process corresponding ARP requests. This is a sane default but renders a huge address space practically unuseable. The RFC states that no address within the 127/8 block should ever appear on any network anywhere but it does not forbid the use of such addresses outside of the loopback device in particular. For example to address a pool of virtual guests behind a load balancer. This patch adds a new interface option 'route_localnet' enabling routing of the 127/8 address block and processing of ARP requests on a specific interface. Note that for the feature to work, the default local route covering 127/8 dev lo needs to be removed. Example: $ sysctl -w net.ipv4.conf.eth0.route_localnet=1 $ ip route del 127.0.0.0/8 dev lo table local $ ip addr add 127.1.0.1/16 dev eth0 $ ip route flush cache V2: Fix invalid check to auto flush cache (thanks davem) Signed-off-by: Thomas Graf <tgraf@suug.ch> Acked-by: Neil Horman <nhorman@tuxdriver.com> Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
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