CVE-2026-45860

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

netfilter: nf_conncount: increase the connection clean up limit to 64

After the optimization to only perform one GC per jiffy, a new problem was introduced. If more than 8 new connections are tracked per jiffy the list won't be cleaned up fast enough possibly reaching the limit wrongly.

In order to prevent this issue, only skip the GC if it was already triggered during the same jiffy and the increment is lower than the clean up limit. In addition, increase the clean up limit to 64 connections to avoid triggering GC too often and do more effective GCs.

This has been tested using a HTTP server and several performance tools while having nftconnlimit/xtconnlimit or OVS limit configured.

Output of slowhttptest + OVS limit at 52000 connections:

slow HTTP test status on 340th second: initializing: 0 pending: 432 connected: 51998 error: 0 closed: 0 service available: YES