This introduces a new generic SOL_SOCKET-level socket option called
SO_BINDTOIFINDEX. It behaves similar to SO_BINDTODEVICE, but takes a
network interface index as argument, rather than the network interface
name.
User-space often refers to network-interfaces via their index, but has
to temporarily resolve it to a name for a call into SO_BINDTODEVICE.
This might pose problems when the network-device is renamed
asynchronously by other parts of the system. When this happens, the
SO_BINDTODEVICE might either fail, or worse, it might bind to the wrong
device.
In most cases user-space only ever operates on devices which they
either manage themselves, or otherwise have a guarantee that the device
name will not change (e.g., devices that are UP cannot be renamed).
However, particularly in libraries this guarantee is non-obvious and it
would be nice if that race-condition would simply not exist. It would
make it easier for those libraries to operate even in situations where
the device-name might change under the hood.
A real use-case that we recently hit is trying to start the network
stack early in the initrd but make it survive into the real system.
Existing distributions rename network-interfaces during the transition
from initrd into the real system. This, obviously, cannot affect
devices that are up and running (unless you also consider moving them
between network-namespaces). However, the network manager now has to
make sure its management engine for dormant devices will not run in
parallel to these renames. Particularly, when you offload operations
like DHCP into separate processes, these might setup their sockets
early, and thus have to resolve the device-name possibly running into
this race-condition.
By avoiding a call to resolve the device-name, we no longer depend on
the name and can run network setup of dormant devices in parallel to
the transition off the initrd. The SO_BINDTOIFINDEX ioctl plugs this
race.
Reviewed-by: Tom Gundersen <teg@jklm.no>
Signed-off-by: David Herrmann <dh.herrmann@gmail.com>
Acked-by: Willem de Bruijn <willemb@google.com>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
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