Linux 6.10 Networking Adds New Intel Hardware Support, More WiFi 7 Enablement

The networking subsystem updates have been submitted for the Linux 6.10 kernel. As usual it's a big update with some 90,083 new lines of code and 37,889 lines removed.

The networking updates for Linux 6.10 range from more performance optimizations in the core code to new wired/wireless networking hardware support, new Bluetooth device support, more WiFi 7 enablement, and other changes.

Some of the Linux 6.10 networking highlights catching my attention include:

- A complete rework to the garbage collection of AF_UNIX sockets. The new code should be faster and allow removing a lot of workarounds that have built up over the years.

- TCP fraglist GRO support to allow chaining multiple TCP packets and forwarding them together. It's noted this should be useful for small Linux switches / routers that lack checksum offloading.

- Support for using SMP threads for handling packet backlog.

- Various other performance optimizations.

- Driver API support for configuring Power over Ethernet (PoE).

- The Intel wired network drivers added PFCP filter support, Ethernet filter support, 5-layer Tx scheduler topology, and other improvements.

- The NVIDIA Mellanox driver has added 800G link modes and 100G SerDes speeds. The NVIDIA Mellanox Ethernet switch driver has improved the events processing performance.

- The Realtek r8169 driver added support for the RTL8168M ASIC.

- A new driver for the Airoha EN8811H 2.5 Gigabit PHY.

- Continued work on WiFi 7 Multi-Link Operation (MLO) and other WiFi 7 features.

- The Intel IWLWIFI driver added BZ-W device support, P2P with HE/EHT support, and other additions.

- The MediaTek MT76 WiFi driver added MT7920E PCI device support.

- The Qualcomm Ath11k driver adds hibernation support and P2P support for the QCA6390, WCN6855 and QCA2066.

- The Qualcomm Ath12k driver also now supports suspend and hibernation support as well as ACPI support.

- The Realtek RTW88 adds RTL8723CS SDIO device support.

- The Realtek RTW89 driver adds RTL8922AE Wi-Fi 7 PCI device support.

- The Realtek rtl8xxxu driver adds Management Frame Protection (MFP) support.

- Intel BlazarI and Filmore Peak2 (BE201) support is added to the Bluetooth driver.

- Libie has been added as the common Intel Ethernet library to help avoid code duplication between the multiple Intel Ethernet drivers.

See this pull request for the complete list of networking patches targeting the Linux 6.10 merge window.