Linux Networking News Archives

Recently queued into the Linux networking subsystem's net-next branch ahead of the Linux 6.18 merge window is the Qualcomm PPE driver to support their Packet Processing Engine on select SoCs.

LF Networking, the networking group within the Linux Foundation, announced from the Open-Source Summit Europe today the release of Essedum 1.0. Essedum 1.0 is for integrating AI into networking environments.

Jakub Kicinski on Sunday sent out the big set of networking subsystem updates heading into the Linux 6.17 kernel. From high-end enterprise and data center hardware down to consumer Ethernet and WiFi devices, the Linux networking space continues to be as busy as ever.

One month ago there was the report on Phoronix of the Broadcom "BNGE" open-source driver being published for forthcoming BCM5770X networking chipsets. That new Broadcom BNGE driver is now set to be introduced in the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel for supporting the new Broadcom wired networking hardware at up to 800 Gigabit speeds.

Broadcom has been working on a new Linux Ethernet networking driver dubbed "BNGE" for supporting their new high-end BCM5770X chipset family.

The Ultra Ethernet Consortium today published the UEC Specification 1.0 release. Nearly two years ago the Ultra Ethernet Consortium was started by Intel, AMD, Meta, HPE, and others and hosted by the Linux Foundation for open and high performance networking with an emphasis on AI and HPC.

There is a lot of exciting networking changes to find with the in-development Linux 6.16 kernel both for wired and wireless devices as well as some exciting core networking improvements/optimizations.

Google engineers the past few years have been working on Device Memory TCP for the Linux kernel to allow zero-copy receive of TCP payloads to DMA-BUF regions such as device memory attached directly to a GPU or AI accelerator or other device memory accessible with DMA-BUF. For Linux 6.12 that initial Device Memory TCP receive support was merged while slated for the upcoming Linux 6.16 cycle is Device Memory TCP TX transfer support.

On the networking front with the upcoming Linux 6.16 merge window is supporting the new Realtek RTL8127A 10GbE Ethernet Controller.

Merged for Linux 6.15 was IO_uring network zero-copy receive "io_uring zcrx" while now on track for landing in Linux 6.16 is extending it to support passing DMA-BUF buffers.

The long-in-development OpenVPN DCO kernel driver for providing data channel offloading (DCO) to yield faster OpenVPN performance looks like it's now in a state for upstreaming with the Linux 6.16 kernel.

The Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP) intended for online gaming, IP telephony, multimedia streaming, and other online real-time purposes for this transport layer protocol is expected to be stripped out of the Linux kernel with the upcoming v6.16 cycle.

For those relying on OpenVPN for your virtual private networking (VPN) needs, one of the most exciting innovations in recent times besides transitioning to the WireGuard alternative is the OpenVPN DCO kernel driver. This "data channel offload" driver has the potential to provide significant performance advantages over the current OpenVPN performance.

The networking subsystem updates for the in-development Linux 6.15 kernel bring multiple nice performance optimizations to enhance Linux networking speeds. The Linux 6.15 networking pull also has support for a number of new wireless and wired network chipsets.

Patches queued up this month into net-next ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel merge window add support for the Airoha NPU... Not to be confused with the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) that is all the rage these days for helping with AI, the Airoha NPU is a Network Processor Unit.

There are a number of NetworkManager VPN plug-ins for different virtual private networking providers as a great way for setting up VPN access from the Linux desktop. But for those interested in using ExpressVPN with their official Linux client, they now offer a GUI to ease the setup process for using their commercial VPN service and proprietary software package.

NetworkManager 1.52 is out today as the newest version of this widely-used system network service and network configuration tool suite for Linux systems.

A new driver planned to be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel cycle is an implementation of MCTP over USB as defined by the DMTF standard DSP0283.

It's looking like IO_uring zero-copy receive support should be ready for the Linux 6.15 kernel cycle this spring.

Days after a DRM driver developer orphaned his drivers due to health reasons in stepping down, the sole maintainer at large of the Linux wireless (WiFi) drivers is stepping down and without any immediate replacement.

Bytedance is praising eBPF as the in-kernel virtual machine for dynamic programs to help speed-up network packet processing, greater tracing and profiling abilities, and a wide-range of other purposes for these dynamic in-kernel programs. By tapping eBPF, Bytedance is reporting a 10% improvement to their networking throughput.

The RDMA subsystem updates have been merged for the Linux 6.14 kernel with a light set of changes overall and the most significant being support for the ROCEv2 protocol within the ERDMA driver.

The big networking subsystem feature pull was sent out this morning for the Linux 6.14 merge window.

Queued up into the networking subsystem's "net-next" branch last week ahead of the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle is AF_XDP zero-copy support for the common Intel Gigabit Ethernet "IGB" driver. With this the AF_XDP performance improvements can be quite dramatic in leveraging this zero-copy path.

For Marvell's line of Octeon line of data processing units (DPUs) and baseband processors, it looks like a new DPU is on the way with the CN20K silicon seeing work on enabling Linux support.

The folks at Cloudflare have published another great engineering blog post with this time covering Multi-Path TCP (MPTCP) as a very interesting addition to the TCP spec. But there they acknowledge the less than ideal Linux support especially on the client side.

There's activity again around potentially disabling and then ultimately removing the RNDIS Linux kernel code for those drivers complying with the Microsoft Remote Network Driver Interface Specification (RNDIS) protocol specification. RNDIS was used atop USB for virtual Ethernet but has proven insecure and problematic.

The Linux kernel already supports the Realtek RTL8125D 2.5G Ethernet controller but additional handling is required to enable the revision B variant of this chipset, which will be coming in the next kernel cycle.

Queued up this past week within the Linux kernel's networking subsystem for the upcoming Linux 6.14 cycle is transmission handling for jumbo data packets as well as RACK-TLP support for managing packet loss and re-transmission. This is work toward supporting larger network transmission windows and higher data throughput.

In development for several years has been the OpenVPN DCO Linux kernel module for data channel offload (DCO) capabilities to provide for much faster virtual private networking (VPN) performance. It's looking like the lengthy review process on OpenVPN DCO is about wrapping up and leaving hope that it will be ready to premiere in next year's Linux 6.14 kernel.

The abundance of networking subsystem updates have been mailed in for the Linux 6.13 kernel from wired and wireless driver enhancements to core networking code improvements.

Intel's iNet Wireless Daemon (IWD) for Linux systems is out with a v3.0 release for this featureful and modern alternative to WPA_Supplicant.

Linux 6.12-rc3 is out today as expected as the newest weekly release candidate in working Linux 6.12 toward a stable release in November.

NetworkManager 1.50 released on Wednesday as the newest version of this software commonly used on the Linux desktop for managing wired and wireless network connections.

For those making use of OpenVPN for your virtual private network (VPN) needs, years in the making has been an "OVPN" Linux kernel driver to enhance the performance by offloading more of the work to kernel-space.

Jakub Kicinski submitted the networking subsystem updates over the weekend for the Linux 6.12 merge window. Most notable this cycle is Device Memory TCP for zero-copy receive of TCP payloads to DMA-BUF regions.

One year ago the first Rust-written network PHY driver was merged for the Linux 6.8 kernel. Since then we've continued seeing steady progress on more Rust-written Linux network code. With the upcoming Linux 6.12 merge window another Rust PHY driver is set to be introduced.

Released this weekend was a new version of WPA_Supplicant along with hostapd for this WiFI Protected Access client and IEEEE-802.1x supplicant. WPA_Supplicant 2.11 is the first major release of this software since early 2022 and as a result comes packing many changes.

The networking subsystem updates have landed for the Linux 6.11 kernel with support for a variety of new wireless and wired networking hardware.

A year ago Google engineers posted experimental Linux code for Device Memory TCP for more efficient transferring of data from GPUs/accelerators to network devices without having to go through a host CPU memory buffer. After going through many rounds of review, Device Memory TCP appears to be nearing the finish line.

The Linux kernel community has sadly lost one of its longtime, prolific contributors to the wireless (WiFi) drivers.

The networking subsystem updates have been submitted for the Linux 6.10 kernel. As usual it's a big update with some 90,083 new lines of code and 37,889 lines removed.

Samba 4.20 is out as the newest feature update to this free software implementation for SMB networking protocol support and others to enhance file/print interoperability with Microsoft Windows systems.

The big set of networking subsystem updates have been sent in for the Linux 6.9 merge window including a number of new wired and wireless devices being supported as well as a number of core networking improvements and optimizations.

Back in 2022 Cloudflare announced they were ditching Nginx for an in-house, Rust-written software called Pingora. Today Cloudflare is open-sourcing the Pingora framework.

NetworkManager 1.46 was released on Thursday as the newest stable update to this software commonly used for managing Linux wired and wireless network connections from the Linux desktop as well as from command-line environments via the nmcli utility.

Beyond the usual new wired/wireless network hardware support and the other routine churn in the big Linux networking subsystem, the Linux 6.8 kernel is bringing some key improvements to the core networking code that can yield up to a ~40% improvement for TCP performance when encountering many concurrent network connections.

Since Linux 6.1 when the very initial Rust infrastructure was added to the Linux kernel there's been a lot of other plumbing and house keeping merged since for enabling kernel drivers to be written in the Rust programming language. With the upcoming Linux 6.8 kernel cycle, the first Rust network driver is set to be introduced.

As with each kernel cycle, the networking subsystem updates for Linux 6.7 are heavy with a wide assortment of core networking infrastructure improvements, (e)BPF features continue to be tacked on, and new wired and wireless network hardware is supported.

Landlock was merged back in 2021 with Linux 5.13 for unprivileged application sandboxing. Landlock is focused on restricting ambient rights and is implemented as a stackable Linux security module (LSM). With Linux 6.7 the Landlock LSM is now moving beyond just file-system access controls to also introduce initial networking support.