Proxy Init Iptables Modes

To transparently route TCP traffic through the proxy, without any awareness from the application, Linkerd will configure a set of firewall rules in each injected pod. Configuration can be done either through an init container or through a CNI plugin

Linkerd’s init container can be run in two separate modes: legacy or nft. The difference between the two modes is what variant of iptables they will use to configure firewall rules.

Details

Modes for the init container can be changed either at upgrade time, or during installation. Once configured, all injected workloads (including the control plane) will use the same mode in the init container. Both modes will use the iptables utility to configure firewall rules; the main difference between the two, is which binary they will call into:

legacy mode will call into iptables-legacy for firewall configuration. This is the default mode that linkerd-init runs in, and is supported by most operating systems and distributions.
nft mode will call into iptables-nft, which uses the newer nf_tables kernel API. The [nftables] utilities are used by newer operating systems to configure firewalls by default.

Conceptually, iptables-nft is a bridge between the legacy and the newer nftables utilities. Under the hood, it uses a different backend, where rules additions and deletions are atomic. The nft version of iptables uses the same packet matching syntax (xtables) as its legacy counterpart.

Because both utilities use the same syntax, it is recommended to run in whatever mode your Kubernetes hosts support best. Certain operating systems (e.g Google Container Optimized OS) do not offer support out-of-the-box for nftables modules. Others (e.g RHEL family of operating systems) do not support the legacy version of iptables. Linkerd’s init container should be run in nft mode only if the nodes support it and contain the relevant nftables modules.

Note

Linkerd supports a -w (wait) option for its init container. Because operations are atomic, and rulesets are not reloaded when modified (only appended),this option is a no-op when running linkerd-init in nft mode.

Installation

The mode for linkerd-init can be overridden through the configuration option proxyInit.mode=iptables|nft. The configuration option can be used for both Helm and CLI installations (or upgrades). For example, the following line will install Linkerd and set the init container mode to nft:

linkerd install --set "proxyInit.mode=nft" | kubectl apply -f -