Intel's ICE Driver Picks Up Forward Error Correction For Linux 5.3

Intel's "ICE" Linux kernel driver for supporting their high-end network cards has new features on tap come Linux 5.3 later this summer.

A few days ago I wrote about ICE seeing some optimizations as well as fixes to this 100GbE wired LAN driver.

The latest feature added now to the ICE driver in the "net-next" tree is FEC, Forward Error Correction. The Forward Error Correction support is now wired up to the ICE driver and the associated knobs added for toggling the FEC parameters from ethtool.

FEC provides for various error controls without the need for retransmitting the data. This FEC support for the Intel ICE driver is in net-next until the opening of the Linux 5.3 merge window in July when it will then reach the mainline code-base.