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.

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