Merge branch 'tcp-lockless-listener'

That's because this is a merge commit of his own branch that contained the applied version of the patchset (presumably to net-next).

See one of the parents: http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.g...

This patch makes it easier to scale inbound TCP requests across multiple cores on your CPU. This helps with both denial-of-service protection, as well as scaling up if you're doing a lot of raw packet processing (e.g. a Layer 4 load balancer).

Your nginx will get even faster! SYN packets (packets with the SYN flag set) are the first packet sent to initiate a TCP connection. A browser connecting to a web server is a TCP connection. So this will enable the linux kernel to handle incoming connection requests way faster. The effect is that high traffic web servers running with already-optimized applications like nginx will become faster under high load, particularly a flood of incoming new connection requests.

If you are trying to weather a TCP based DDoS attack, you have a better chance at your server staying up, provided your connection isn't saturated.

If you're running a load balancer, reverse proxy, port forwarding, or anything else that will receive significant traffic and requires a TCP connection to your server, your server will be faster.

This also affects anything that listens on a TCP socket, like postfix (email), SSH, FTP, memcached, redis, mysql etc..etc..