É para reduzir a contenção entre connect() e bind() (apareceu no Linux 4.2; Jessie tem 3.16 e o Stretch 4.9):
commit 07f4c90062f8fc7c8c26f8f95324cbe8fa3145a5 Author: Eric Dumazet Date: Sun May 24 14:49:35 2015 -0700 tcp/dccp: try to not exhaust ip_local_port_range in connect() A long standing problem on busy servers is the tiny available TCP port range (/proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_local_port_range) and the default sequential allocation of source ports in connect() system call. If a host is having a lot of active TCP sessions, chances are very high that all ports are in use by at least one flow, and subsequent bind(0) attempts fail, or have to scan a big portion of space to find a slot. In this patch, I changed the starting point in __inet_hash_connect() so that we try to favor even [1] ports, leaving odd ports for bind() users. We still perform a sequential search, so there is no guarantee, but if connect() targets are very different, end result is we leave more ports available to bind(), and we spread them all over the range, lowering time for both connect() and bind() to find a slot. This strategy only works well if /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_local_port_range is even, ie if start/end values have different parity. Therefore, default /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_local_port_range was changed to 32768 - 60999 (instead of 32768 - 61000) There is no change on security aspects here, only some poor hashing schemes could be eventually impacted by this change. [1] : The odd/even property depends on ip_local_port_range values parity
Você também pode querer ver o seguinte commit 1580ab63fc9a03593072cc5656167a75c4f1d173 .