Linux Networking News Archives

While Cloudflare is in the process of replacing Nginx with their in-house, Rust-written alternative, the Cloudflare infrastructure is vast and has many different services at play. For one of the areas they are still currently relying on Nginx, this week they published a blog post outlining how they rewrote an Nginx module in the C programming language to instead make use of Rust.

As part of the Linux networking updates for the Linux 6.3 cycle in addition to the BIG TCP support for IPv4 that can yield higher throughput and lower latency, another networking change worth pointing out is the introduction of the "ath12k" driver for Qualcomm WiFi 7 hardware support.

The networking subsystem feature updates for the Linux 6.3 kernel were submitted today that feature not only some prominent networking driver enhancements and new wired/wireless hardware support but also core networking improvements like BIG TCP for IPv4.

With the next Linux kernel cycle we could see upstream disable their driver support for Microsoft's Remote Network Driver Interface Specification (RNDIS) protocol due to security concerns.

A new set of patches posted for the Plan 9 (9p) resource sharing protocol code inside the Linux kernel can deliver roughly 10x better performance for file transfers.

The big batch of networking subsystem feature updates for the Linux 6.2 merge window has landed.

The first beta of OpenVPN 2.6 is now available and it's a big one for those using this cross-platform, virtual private network (VPN) system.

One of countless great open-source projects from Intel over the years is IWD as a modern wireless daemon for WiFi devices on Linux. IWD has been in the works for over a half-decade as a new replacement to wpa_supplicant and with time has implemented many features and seen widespread adoption. Released this week was IWD 2.0 as the latest milestone for this open-source wireless daemon.

Landing in "net-next" on Monday is wired networking support for the MotorComm YT8521 Ethernet Gigabit PHY. This network ASIC may not ring a bell for most folks, but is used so far by one notable RISC-V development board.

Picked up this week in the "net-next" code ahead of the Linux 6.2 merge window in December is support for TCP Protective Load Balancing (PLB).

The Linux kernel's networking subsystem is beginning to make preparations for 800 Gbps Ethernet networking.

Daniel Stenberg has announced the release of cURL 7.86 as the newest version of this command-line utility and library for various networking purposes.

Linux's universal TUN driver that provides packet reception and transmission for user-space programs may soon see a 1000x speed-up with a proposed patch sent out today for this network driver.

A set of Linux kernel WiFi stack security issues were made public today. The Linux 6.1 Git kernel has now merged fixes for these vulnerabilities while the fixes also work their way to being back-ported to existing stable series.

The networking feature pull for the Linux 6.1 kernel brings 127k lines of new code and 50k lines of code removed as a rather hearty set of wired/wireless networking driver updates and core improvements this round.

Cloudflare has long relied upon Nginx as part of its HTTP proxy stack but now has replaced it with their in-house, Rust-written Pingora software that is said to be serving over one trillion requests per day and delivering better performance while only using about a third of the CPU and memory resources.

One of the interesting capabilities with Thunderbolt and now USB4 that is seemingly not too widely used is for networking between systems. The Linux kernel for the past half-decade already has offered a Thunderbolt networking driver for networking between hosts with Thunderbolt cables. The latest improvement on this front is now supporting USB4's end-to-end flow control mode.

NetworkManager 1.40 has been released as this widely-used software for configuring wired and wireless network interfaces under Linux.

With the Linux 5.19 kernel there are some exciting networking improvements like big TCP support, PureLiFi drivers for light-based networking, WFX WiFi being promoted out of staging, and much more. Now with the in-development Linux 6.0 there is a lot more work in store.

DECnet as a set of networking protocols from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) that date back to 1975 are expected to be finally removed from the Linux kernel. The DECnet protocols have long been obsolete, the Linux kernel implementation has been orphaned for more than one decade, and is code that belongs more in a history museum than the mainline kernel.

The long in development work around IO_uring zero-copy send for the Linux kernel's networking subsystem is now ready for mainline.

The networking subsystem updates have landed in the Linux 5.19 kernel with big updates to core networking code as well as a lot of individual driver work this cycle both for wired and wireless networking.

Back in 2019 Realtek contributed the open-source "RTW88" WiFi driver to the Linux kernel for supporting their newer wireless chipsets on Linux. To date the mainline driver has just supported their PCI-based WiFi adapters while a patch series now out for review extends the driver to supporting their newer USB-specific chipsets.

The Solarflare "SFC" network driver within the Linux kernel for their high performance network adapters, owned by Xilinx and now owned by AMD, is seeing some restructuring with the next version of the Linux kernel. The intention is on shifting older network hardware to a separate kernel module/driver so improvements and new hardware support can be the focus with this main Solarflare Linux network driver.

There are many networking changes already building up in "net-next" ahead of the Linux 5.19 kernel cycle kicking off this summer. Merged yesterday is support within the Mellanox Ethernet "mlxsw" kernel driver for supporting the NVIDIA Mellanox SN4800 modular switch.

Added back in 2019 to the Linux staging area was the "WFX" WiFi driver for low-power IoT hardware from Silicon Labs. After three years of hard work by Silicon Labs engineers and open-source developers, this driver for the WF200 series of wireless chips is set to be promoted in the Linux 5.19 cycle.

The networking subsystem updates are busy as always with each Linux kernel merge window.

Back in 2019 the folks at CloudFlare announced BoringTun as a Rust-written WireGuard user-space implementation. Yesterday marked the first tagged release of BoringTun in the form of version 0.4.

NetworkManager 1.36 is now available for this widely-used software for managing Linux wired and wireless network connections.

With Linux 5.17 are some nice networking performance optimizations touching different areas while the never-ending optimization work will continue with Linux 5.18.

Among the many new features in Linux 5.17 are several notable network optimizations. Optimizing network performance is a never-ending game and already for a future kernel are a new set of UDP/IPv6 optimizations being worked on.

The Linux networking subsystem updates for the in-development 5.17 kernel are quite exciting as usual given how prolific Linux is from large servers in the cloud to running on enterprise networking gear down to Linux on small IoT hardware. Not only is there a lot of hardware driver action as usual but also some key performance/latency optimizations.

As part of the plethora of networking changes for Linux 5.17, NVIDIA is introducing support for Spectrum-4 networking ASICs.

Another important step toward Apple M1 hardware being useful under Linux is in the process of being realized... Working WiFi. The initial "request for comments" patch series was sent out today enabling the Broadcom "BRCMFMAC" driver to work for the wireless LAN support on the M1 SoC as well as with the Apple T2 platforms.

Intel's open-source IWD modern wireless daemon that works with the likes of NetworkManager, systemd-networkd, and their own ConnMan has been preparing support for WiFi Device Provisioning Protocol (DPP).

Sent out last month were an early set of patches working on IO_uring zero-copy send support for the networking subsystem. This work to boost the throughput potential has evolved now into a second revision of the patches and continues looking very promising.

Early patches providing for IO_uring zero-copy send support for the Linux kernel's networking subsystem is looking extremely promising for greater throughput.

Last week I wrote about a big TCP performance optimization having been queued up into net-next for Linux 5.17. That optimization can yield significant TCP throughput improvements especially with today's high-end 100Gb+ network hardware. There is now another separate juicy optimization to benefit the Linux network performance in the next kernel cycle.

While the Linux 5.16 merge window just ended and that kernel won't be out until the tail end of the calendar year, already for Linux 5.17 new material is beginning to accumulate in the respective subsystem development trees... One set of changes merged this morning from Google can provide a sizable performance win around TCP performance in the datacenter.

Given the wide range of hardware running Linux and especially Linux being dominant in the data center, the networking changes each kernel cycle remain quite vibrant. Linux 5.16 is no exception with the main feature pull sent in on Monday for all the networking updates.

Arriving in the wireless-drivers-next branch this week is the "rtw89" driver as a Realtek-contributed open-source 802.11ax WiFi driver.

Retail shopping giant Walmart has found use out eBPF programs and today announced the open-source L3AF to help in the effort.

Generating much excitement back in 2018 was bpfilter for the potential to better Linux's firewall and packet filtering by making it more robust and performance. Recently work on this BPF-based firewall solution was renewed and the performance potential over iptables and nftables is looking very good for the future.

Aya was presented during this week's Linux Plumbers Conference for improving the eBPF developer experience by allowing Rust programs to easily run within the kernel.

OpenVPN has been implementing a kernel module for data channel offload (DCO) capabilities to enhance the performance of this virtual private network system.

The staging updates for Linux 5.15 continue to have a lot of code churn including some drivers being promoted while one Realtek WiFi driver has been replaced.

The networking subsystem updates for the recently opened Linux 5.15 merge window have landed.

The Netfilter project has announced the release of Nftables 1.0.0 for their user-space code for interfacing with the Linux kernel's Nftables subsystem for network filtering and classification.

Last year major VPN provider ExpressVPN announced "Lightway" as their new virtual private network protocol designed for speed, stability, and reliability. ExpressVPN announced today they are now making the protocol open-source.

While Samba is well known for SMB/CIFS server support on Linux and other platforms for supporting Microsoft's SMB networking protocol for file and print services, Samba is implemented in user-space while Samsung has been pursuing an SMB server implemented in kernel-space for better performance and wiring up new features that can be more easily accomplished within the kernel.