[RFC PATCH net-next 2/2] Reduce localhost to 127.0.0.0/16

[Dave Taht <dave.taht@gmail.com>]

The 127 concept of "localhost" was  basically a straight port over from
original ARPANET behavior. At the time it was envisioned that
many services would exist in the mainframe that would need to be
individually addressable, and long predated alternative approaches
such as tipc, etc.

This reduces 127.0.0.0/8 to a /16, and opens up 127.1.0.0 and above
for use as real, unicast addresses either on the wire or internal
to containers, virtual machines, vpns, etc.

The only major uses of 127 to date have been (of
course) 127.0.0.1 and 127.0.1.1 (for dns), and various adhoc uses
for things like anti-spam daemons.

Linux also has a non-standard treatment of the entire 127 address
space - anything sent to any address there "just works". This patch
preserves that behavior for 127.0.0.0/16 only.

Other uses, such as ntp's 127.127 "handle" for it, doesn't actually
touch the stack.  We've seen 127.x used for chassis access and a few
other explicit uses in the field, but very little.

There is some small hope that we can preserve the original intent of
"localhost" in an age of stacked vms and containers, where instead of
using rfc1918 nat at each level, we can route, instead.


---
 include/linux/in.h | 4 +++-
 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/include/linux/in.h b/include/linux/in.h
index 8665842a3589..6e4f37e5bf51 100644
--- a/include/linux/in.h
+++ b/include/linux/in.h
@@ -37,7 +37,9 @@ static inline int proto_ports_offset(int proto)
 
 static inline bool ipv4_is_loopback(__be32 addr)
 {
-	return (addr & htonl(0xff000000)) == htonl(0x7f000000);
+	if((addr & htonl(0xff000000)) == htonl(0x7f000000))
+		return( addr & htonl(0x00ff0000)) == 0;
+	return 0;
 }
 
 static inline bool ipv4_is_multicast(__be32 addr)
-- 
2.17.1