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 .