In going through the hundreds of new networking patches for the Linux 6.17 merge window, some of the most interesting wired and wireless networking changes for this next kernel release include:
- Various ongoing work around WiFI 7 and Extremely High Throughput (EHT), such as with the Qualcomm Ath12k driver.
- The Broadcom BNGE driver is merged for supporting new Broadcom 800G Ethernet devices with Broadcom BCM5770X hardware.
- For the existing Broadcom BNXT driver there is now support for zero-copy transmit to DMA-BUF memory for easier and more efficient sharing of packets with other drivers/hardware.
- The Broadcom B53 driver meanwhile adds support for BCM5325 switches.
- The Broadcom brcm80211 WiFi driver adds support for the SDI-based BCM43751.
- The NVIDIA Mellanox code has new zero-copy receive and transmit interfaces for DMA-BUF and IO_uring usage.
- The Intel networking code is preparing for live VM migration handling, flow steering in IDPF, and other enhancements.
- The Intel PCIe Bluetooth driver adds support for Function Level Reset (FLR).
- The Marvell Cavium driver code has added support for C20K Octeon chips.
- The Realtek R8169 driver enables Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) at 5 Gbps speeds for the RTL8126 chipset.
- The Realtek RTW89 WiFi driver added support for the RTL8851BU and RTL8852BU USB devices.
- The AMD XGBE driver adds support for hardware timestamping and PTP clock support.
- A new driver is added for the Microchip ZL3073x DPLL.
- The Linux WiFi code has extended regulatory info support for 6GHz WiFi.
- The IBM NETIUCV driver is being removed as the Inter-User Communication Vehicle (IUCV) for z/VM communication.
- Multi-cast routing is now allowed to take effect for locally-generated packets.
- The Management Component Transport Protocol (MCTP) support now allows for gateway routing.
More details on all of the networking changes readied for Linux 6.17 via this pull .