Broadcom Has 200G Ethernet Link Speed Support Coming To Its Driver For Linux 5.10

Broadcom engineers have prepared their Linux network driver infrastructure for supporting 200G link speeds.

Coming to Broadcom's "bnxt_en" Linux network driver in Linux 5.10 are the necessary alterations for handling 200G links. It was back in late 2018 when Broadcom first announced the world's first 200G Ethernet controller utilizing 50G PAM-4 and PCI Express 4.0. Now as we approach the end of 2020 and prepping for an interesting 2021 of new hardware, bnxt_en is ready with this 200G Ethernet link speed.

This includes new bnxt_en infrastructure for supporting PAM4 modulation and then building off that is the PAM4 link speeds up to 200G. There isn't though any new hardware enablement as part of these current Broadcom network changes going into Linux 5.10.

Also coming in Linux 5.10 for this Broadcom network driver with these updates are FEC (Forward Error Correction) support. Forward error correction is particularly important for error correction / reliability in the 100G+ data transmission range and thus good to see it being supported by bnxt_en given this the 200G support.