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network...espaces(7) Miscellaneous Information Manualnetwork...espaces(7)network_namespaces - overview of Linux network namespaces
Network namespaces provide isolation of the system resources associated with networking: network devices, IPv4 and IPv6 protocol stacks, IP routing tables, firewall rules, the/proc/net directory (which is a symbolic link to/proc/pid/net), the/sys/class/net directory, various files under/proc/sys/net, port numbers (sockets), and so on. In addition, network namespaces isolate the UNIX domain abstract socket namespace (seeunix(7)). A physical network device can live in exactly one network namespace. When a network namespace is freed (i.e., when the last process in the namespace terminates), its physical network devices are moved back to the initial network namespace (not to the namespace of the parent of the process). A virtual network (veth(4)) device pair provides a pipe-like abstraction that can be used to create tunnels between network namespaces, and can be used to create a bridge to a physical network device in another namespace. When a namespace is freed, theveth(4) devices that it contains are destroyed. Use of network namespaces requires a kernel that is configured with theCONFIG_NET_NSoption.
nsenter(1),unshare(1),clone(2),veth(4),proc(5),sysfs(5),namespaces(7),user_namespaces(7),brctl(8),ip(8),ip-address(8),ip-link(8),ip-netns(8),iptables(8),ovs-vsctl(8)
This page is part of theman-pages (Linux kernel and C library user-space interface documentation) project. Information about the project can be found at ⟨https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/⟩. If you have a bug report for this manual page, see ⟨https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git/tree/CONTRIBUTING⟩. This page was obtained from the tarball man-pages-6.15.tar.gz fetched from ⟨https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/man-pages/⟩ on 2025-08-11. If you discover any rendering problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there is a better or more up- to-date source for the page, or you have corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON (which isnot part of the original manual page), send a mail to man-pages@man7.orgLinux man-pages 6.15 2025-05-17network...espaces(7)Pages that refer to this page:nsenter(1), unshare(1), clone(2), lttng-ust(3), veth(4), proc_pid_net(5), systemd.socket(5), namespaces(7), rdma-system(8)
HTML rendering created 2025-09-06 byMichael Kerrisk, author ofThe Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depthLinux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, lookhere. Hosting byjambit GmbH. | |