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>

1 files changed, 5 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/networking/ip-sysctl.txt b/Documentation/networking/ip-sysctl.txt
index 6f896b9..99d0e05 100644
--- a/Documentation/networking/ip-sysctl.txt
+++ b/Documentation/networking/ip-sysctl.txt
@@ -862,6 +862,11 @@ accept_local - BOOLEAN
 	local interfaces over the wire and have them accepted properly.
 	default FALSE
 
+route_localnet - BOOLEAN
+	Do not consider loopback addresses as martian source or destination
+	while routing. This enables the use of 127/8 for local routing purposes.
+	default FALSE
+
 rp_filter - INTEGER
 	0 - No source validation.
 	1 - Strict mode as defined in RFC3704 Strict Reverse Path