Linux Networking News Archives

In development for several years has been the OpenVPN DCO Linux kernel module for data channel offload (DCO) capabilities to provide for much faster virtual private networking (VPN) performance. It's looking like the lengthy review process on OpenVPN DCO is about wrapping up and leaving hope that it will be ready to premiere in next year's Linux 6.14 kernel.

The abundance of networking subsystem updates have been mailed in for the Linux 6.13 kernel from wired and wireless driver enhancements to core networking code improvements.

Intel's iNet Wireless Daemon (IWD) for Linux systems is out with a v3.0 release for this featureful and modern alternative to WPA_Supplicant.

Linux 6.12-rc3 is out today as expected as the newest weekly release candidate in working Linux 6.12 toward a stable release in November.

NetworkManager 1.50 released on Wednesday as the newest version of this software commonly used on the Linux desktop for managing wired and wireless network connections.

For those making use of OpenVPN for your virtual private network (VPN) needs, years in the making has been an "OVPN" Linux kernel driver to enhance the performance by offloading more of the work to kernel-space.

Jakub Kicinski submitted the networking subsystem updates over the weekend for the Linux 6.12 merge window. Most notable this cycle is Device Memory TCP for zero-copy receive of TCP payloads to DMA-BUF regions.

One year ago the first Rust-written network PHY driver was merged for the Linux 6.8 kernel. Since then we've continued seeing steady progress on more Rust-written Linux network code. With the upcoming Linux 6.12 merge window another Rust PHY driver is set to be introduced.

Released this weekend was a new version of WPA_Supplicant along with hostapd for this WiFI Protected Access client and IEEEE-802.1x supplicant. WPA_Supplicant 2.11 is the first major release of this software since early 2022 and as a result comes packing many changes.

The networking subsystem updates have landed for the Linux 6.11 kernel with support for a variety of new wireless and wired networking hardware.

A year ago Google engineers posted experimental Linux code for Device Memory TCP for more efficient transferring of data from GPUs/accelerators to network devices without having to go through a host CPU memory buffer. After going through many rounds of review, Device Memory TCP appears to be nearing the finish line.

The Linux kernel community has sadly lost one of its longtime, prolific contributors to the wireless (WiFi) drivers.

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.

Samba 4.20 is out as the newest feature update to this free software implementation for SMB networking protocol support and others to enhance file/print interoperability with Microsoft Windows systems.

The big set of networking subsystem updates have been sent in for the Linux 6.9 merge window including a number of new wired and wireless devices being supported as well as a number of core networking improvements and optimizations.

Back in 2022 Cloudflare announced they were ditching Nginx for an in-house, Rust-written software called Pingora. Today Cloudflare is open-sourcing the Pingora framework.

NetworkManager 1.46 was released on Thursday as the newest stable update to this software commonly used for managing Linux wired and wireless network connections from the Linux desktop as well as from command-line environments via the nmcli utility.

Beyond the usual new wired/wireless network hardware support and the other routine churn in the big Linux networking subsystem, the Linux 6.8 kernel is bringing some key improvements to the core networking code that can yield up to a ~40% improvement for TCP performance when encountering many concurrent network connections.

Since Linux 6.1 when the very initial Rust infrastructure was added to the Linux kernel there's been a lot of other plumbing and house keeping merged since for enabling kernel drivers to be written in the Rust programming language. With the upcoming Linux 6.8 kernel cycle, the first Rust network driver is set to be introduced.

As with each kernel cycle, the networking subsystem updates for Linux 6.7 are heavy with a wide assortment of core networking infrastructure improvements, (e)BPF features continue to be tacked on, and new wired and wireless network hardware is supported.

Landlock was merged back in 2021 with Linux 5.13 for unprivileged application sandboxing. Landlock is focused on restricting ambient rights and is implemented as a stackable Linux security module (LSM). With Linux 6.7 the Landlock LSM is now moving beyond just file-system access controls to also introduce initial networking support.

In addition to old and unmaintained Ethernet driver code set for removal, there is an effort underway to clear out some obsolete and orphaned WiFi drivers from the Linux kernel.

While the Linux kernel tends to keep around drivers for even very old hardware, once there are no known users left that would still be updating to new Linux kernel versions or the drivers pose a significant maintenance burden, it's eventually time to let them go. We've seen the WiMAX wireless code removed and now the latest on the Linux wireless networking side inching close to the chopping block are old WiFi drivers.

Following the news from a few days ago that Curl was prepping for its worst security flaw in a long time affecting the project, Curl 8.4 is now available and with new light on this issue.

Google, Cloudflare and AWS today disclosed a new zero-day vulnerability called the HTTP/2 Rapid Reset attack. This attack that is being seen in the real-world relies on a weakness in the HTTP2 protocol for carrying out "hyper volumetric" Distributed Denial of Service attacks.

The Linux kernel's Fair Queue "FQ" network packet scheduling algorithm that is celebrating its 10th anniversary since being mainlined in the Linux 3.12 kernel cycle is celebrating by rolling out some performance optimizations with the next version of the Linux kernel.

The first of three parts for MSG_ZEROCOPY preparations for the VirtIO-Vsock driver have been queued into net-next ahead of planned introduction in the Linux 6.7 kernel as another means of achieving greater performance within virtual machines.

One of the new Linux networking features we've been looking forward to seeing in the kernel is TCP Authentication Option (TCP-AO / RFC5925) as a means of improving TCP security and authenticity. The eleventh iteration of the TCP-AO patches were posted today for the Linux kernel with it looking like work on this network addition potentially wrapping up soon.

Released nearly one year ago was GNU Wget2 2.0 as a big improvement over Wget to support more protocols like HTTP/2, enabling multi-threading support and parallel connections, and a range of other feature additions. Published on Thursday was Wget2 2.1 as the newest step forward for this much-improved Wget open-source downloading solution.

The big set of Linux networking subsystem updates were sent out today for the recently-started Linux 6.6 kernel merge window. There are a number of core networking improvements this cycle, support for various new wired and wireless chipsets, and improvements made to existing Ethernet and WiFi drivers.

While Linux 6.1 added the initial Rust infrastructure as an alternative programming language for writing new kernel modules, so far as of Linux 6.5 much of the upstreaming effort has been around adding new abstractions and supporting additional subsystems for making the Rust capabilities in the kernel more complete. The latest patch series is working on adding Rust abstractions for networking sockets and other fundamental networking bits.

Intel's open-source ConnMan software that is an Internet connect manager focused on embedded Linux devices is out with a new release.

The Linux Foundation has established the Ultra Ethernet Consortium "UED" as an industry-wide effort founded by AMD, Arista, Broadcom, Cisco, Eviden, HPE, Intel, Meta, and Microsoft for designing a new Ethernet-based communication stack architecture for high performance networking.

The Linux 6.5 networking subsystem changes include more preparations around the ongoing WiFi 7 wireless standard as well as bringing up support for a number of newer network adapters.

A new set of patches this weekend begin laying the groundwork for Rust abstractions for Linux network device drivers so that Rust code can be used for constructing new network device drivers. The patches also include a dummy Rust network driver.

With Linux running on everything from tiny single board computers with basic WiFi or Ethernet networking up through massive super-computer clusters, the Linux networking subsystem continues seeing immense improvements each kernel cycle. With Linux 6.4 the networking changes are heavy from new hardware support (including Apple M1 Pro/Max WiFi!) to continued work around WiFi 7 support as well as never-ending work on performance optimizations.

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.