IGMP: Inhibit reports for local multicast groups
The range of addresses between 224.0.0.0 and 224.0.0.255 inclusive, is reserved for the use of routing protocols and other low-level topology discovery or maintenance protocols, such as gateway discovery and group membership reporting. Multicast routers should not forward any multicast datagram with destination addresses in this range, regardless of its TTL. Currently, IGMP reports are generated for this reserved range of addresses even though a router will ignore this information since it has no purpose. However, the presence of reserved group addresses in an IGMP membership report uses up network bandwidth and can also obscure addresses of interest when inspecting membership reports using packet inspection or debug messages. Although the RFCs for the various version of IGMP (e.g.RFC 3376 for v3) do not specify that the reserved addresses be excluded from membership reports, it should do no harm in doing so. In particular there should be no adverse effect in any IGMP snooping functionality since 224.0.0.x is specifically excluded as per RFC 4541 (IGMP and MLD Snooping Switches Considerations) section 2.1.2. Data Forwarding Rules: 2) Packets with a destination IP (DIP) address in the 224.0.0.X range which are not IGMP must be forwarded on all ports. IGMP reports for local multicast groups can now be optionally inhibited by means of a system control variable (by setting the value to zero) e.g.: echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/igmp_link_local_mcast_reports To retain backwards compatibility the previous behaviour is retained by default on system boot or reverted by setting the value back to non-zero e.g.: echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/igmp_link_local_mcast_reports Signed-off-by: Philip Downey <pdowney@brocade.com> Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
Please register or sign in to comment