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⇱ Many Networking Performance Improvements & New Hardware In Linux 6.18 - Phoronix


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Many Networking Performance Improvements & New Hardware In Linux 6.18

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Networking on 6 October 2025 at 09:42 AM EDT. 1 Comment
The networking subsytem updates for Linux 6.18 have been merged. There is a lot of enticing performance optimizations in different areas of the networking stack for this new kernel. Plus new wired and wireless networking hardware support and other improvements to get excited about for this LTS kernel version.

Linux 6.18 networking highlights include:

- Some big improvements for servers encountering DDoS attacks. Particularly for Linux servers suffering from distributed denial of service attacks is much better scalability and better throughput capacity.

- Google PSP encryption for TCP connections. This is the PSP Security Protocol for encryption in-transit of TCP network connections. Upstreaming this to the mainline kernel has been a long time coming.

- Continued work around accelerating ECN for TCP and striving toward Low Latency, Low Loss, and Scalable Throughput (L4S).

- TCP and UDP receive improvements on large multi-NUMA hosts.

- TCP socket binary layout enhancements for better data locality and less cache lines involved in the fast path.

- Improved Multi-Path TCP (MPTCP) receive performance.

- A new "hinic3" driver for supporting the Huawei 3rd Gen NIC.

- A new SpacemiT driver for the K1 Ethernet MAC.

- Qualcomm IPQ9574 SoC Ethernet support.

- Airoha WLAN offloading via the NPU.

- New Ethernet PHY support for the Aquantia AQR412 and AQR115 as well as the Micrel lan8842.

- WiFI Extended Neighbor Awareness Networking "NAN" support.

- The Realtek RTW89 driver preparing for RTL8922DE support.

- Bluetooth support for new Mediatek MT7925 IDs.

- Intel Bluetooth support for the BlazarIW core as well as the Panther Lake-H484 IDs.

👁 networking


More details on the numerous networking improvements with Linux 6.18 via this pull.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.