Linux 6.16 Networking Brings Some Big Performance Improvements & OpenVPN Driver
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.
The networking pull request is now merged for the Linux 6.16. As usual there is a ton of networking changes this cycle due to the widespread use of Linux from embedded and consumer devices up through hyper-scaler servers with very high-end networking gear. Some of the core networking improvements for Linux 6.16 include:
- Implementing the Device Memory TCP transmit path to allow zero-copy data transmissions on top of TCP from device memory like GPU vRAM directly to the network.
- After moving all of the IPv6 routing tables management outside the RTNL scope and under its own lock and RCU, the remote control path is now three times faster.
- Improved TCP receiver buffer auto-tuning and increased default upper-bound for the receive buffer, to yield around a throughput improvement of over 60% on a single flow maximum throughput test using a 200Gb link.
- Improved control plane scalability.
- Optimizations to the GRO engine for UDP-tunneled traffic to yield around a 10% improvement in stream related tests.
- Retiring the Datagram Congestion Control Protocol "DCCP".
On the networking driver side for Linux 6.16 there is:
- The OpenVPN DCO driver was finally merged! This can yield much faster performance for OpenVPN virtual private networking by offloading the data channel processing to kernel-space.
- Realtek MT9888 2.5G Ethernet device driver is merged.
- An AMD Renoir Ethernet device driver is merged.
- The Aeonsemi 10G C45 PHY driver is another new addition to the networking subsystem.
- The NVIDIA Mellanox MLX5 driver has refactored the stearing table handling code to significantly reduce the amount of memory used.
- The Intel IDPF driver has merged initial RDMA support as well as PTP support.
- The Realtek rtl8211 driver added Wake-On-LAN magic packet support.
- Loongson 2K3000 support within the Synopsys STMMAC driver.
- WiFi mac80211 wireless scan improvements for Multi-Link Operation (MLO) mode.
- WiFi 7 improvements for the Mediatek MT76 driver as well as enabling MT7990 chipset support.
- The Realtek RTW88 driver is enjoying improved throughput for the RTL8814AU chipset.
- The Realtek RTW89 driver added Multi-Link Operation (MLO) support.
- HCI driver protocol support for Bluetooth.
More details on all of the Linux 6.16 networking changes via this pull.
The networking pull request is now merged for the Linux 6.16. As usual there is a ton of networking changes this cycle due to the widespread use of Linux from embedded and consumer devices up through hyper-scaler servers with very high-end networking gear. Some of the core networking improvements for Linux 6.16 include:
- Implementing the Device Memory TCP transmit path to allow zero-copy data transmissions on top of TCP from device memory like GPU vRAM directly to the network.
- After moving all of the IPv6 routing tables management outside the RTNL scope and under its own lock and RCU, the remote control path is now three times faster.
- Improved TCP receiver buffer auto-tuning and increased default upper-bound for the receive buffer, to yield around a throughput improvement of over 60% on a single flow maximum throughput test using a 200Gb link.
- Improved control plane scalability.
- Optimizations to the GRO engine for UDP-tunneled traffic to yield around a 10% improvement in stream related tests.
- Retiring the Datagram Congestion Control Protocol "DCCP".
On the networking driver side for Linux 6.16 there is:
- The OpenVPN DCO driver was finally merged! This can yield much faster performance for OpenVPN virtual private networking by offloading the data channel processing to kernel-space.
- Realtek MT9888 2.5G Ethernet device driver is merged.
- An AMD Renoir Ethernet device driver is merged.
- The Aeonsemi 10G C45 PHY driver is another new addition to the networking subsystem.
- The NVIDIA Mellanox MLX5 driver has refactored the stearing table handling code to significantly reduce the amount of memory used.
- The Intel IDPF driver has merged initial RDMA support as well as PTP support.
- The Realtek rtl8211 driver added Wake-On-LAN magic packet support.
- Loongson 2K3000 support within the Synopsys STMMAC driver.
- WiFi mac80211 wireless scan improvements for Multi-Link Operation (MLO) mode.
- WiFi 7 improvements for the Mediatek MT76 driver as well as enabling MT7990 chipset support.
- The Realtek RTW88 driver is enjoying improved throughput for the RTL8814AU chipset.
- The Realtek RTW89 driver added Multi-Link Operation (MLO) support.
- HCI driver protocol support for Bluetooth.
More details on all of the Linux 6.16 networking changes via this pull.