Linux 5.9 Networking Changes Are As Active As Ever

Each kernel cycle the networking subsystem sees a lot of churn given the importance of network interconnect performance and reliability especially in high performance computing environments where Linux dominates.

With Linux 5.9 the networking churn is active as usual with a wide assortment of changes:

- The Qualcomm Atheros Ath11k driver now supports the 6GHz WiFi.

- Xilinx EF100 NIC support.

- Support for 5GBASE-T i40e NICs.

- Intel is making it easier to flash Ethernet device firmware for the E800 series hardware on the ICE driver in handling of Platform Level Data Model (PLDM) firmware updates.

- The CXGB4 driver also now allows flashing different firmware images. This is the driver for Celsio 1G and 10G network cards.

- Support for hardware IPSEC offload on bonding slaves.

- The bpftool program now show a list of processes holding BPF file descriptor references to maps/programs/inks/objects.

- BPF can now iterate over TCP and UDP sockets.

- XDP support in the Xen-NetFront driver.

- Support receiver buffer auto-tuning within MPTCP, the Multi-Path TCP code merged earlier this year, along with other MPTCP improvements this cycle.

- A wide variety of other fixes and improvements.

More details via this Git merge.