Linux 6.15 Networking Delivers Many Nice Performance Optimizations & New Hardware

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.

Some of the most interesting network highlights for Linux 6.15 include:

- Optimized MPTCP performance in single subflow mode by 29%.

- TCP stream performance can be improved by up to 2x with enabling GRO on packets that went through XDP CPU redirect.

- Improve performance of contended connect() by 200% by searching for an available 4-tuple RCU rather than a spin lock. This yields a 229% improvement by tweaking the hash distribution.

- Performance under UDP floods is improved by as much as 10% by avoiding unconditionally touching sk_tsflags on receive.

- The ability to collect TCP timestamps for data submitted / sent / acked in BPF to allow for application-transparent lower-overhead tracking of TCP RPC performance.

- Adding an MCTP transport driver for MCTP-over-USB .

- Support for SFP module access over SMBus.

- The Broadcom BNXT driver adds support for Intel Killer E5000 Ethernet support .

- Support for the Airoha RISC-V NPU packet processing unit .

- Support for the Realtek RTL8814AE and RTL8814AU wireless chipsets within the RTW88 driver.

- A new iwlmld sub-driver as part of the Intel IWLWIFI driver for supporting new hardware/firmware combinations.

- The Mediatek MT76 WiFi driver is preparing support for Multi-Link Operation (MLO) for the MT7996 chipset.

More details on these many interesting network changes for Linux 6.15 via this pull that has already been merged to Git.