Li-Fi that uses LED lighting for wireless communication between devices is a step closer to reality on Linux systems with leading commercial start-up pureLiFi continuing to move closer to upstreaming the driver supporting their hardware that supports this technology.

PureLiFi, one of the leaders when it comes to Li-Fi for high-speed, light-based wireless technology, has been spending the past few months bringing up their open-source Linux driver to the mainline kernel for their devices.

With the WiMAX 802.16 standard not being widely used outside of the Aeronautical Mobile Airport Communication System (AeroMACS) and usage in some developing nations, the Linux kernel may end up dropping its support for WiMAX but first there is a proposal to demote it to staging while seeing if any users remain.

The big networking pull request has landed in Linux 5.10 Git.

For those making use of the "MT76" WiFi driver for Mediatek MT76 series wireless support, the Linux 5.10 kernel should be a nice upgrade.

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

It was the recent Facebook patches for implementing NetGPU that with one of the NVIDIA-focused patches led to the recent controversy around "GPL condoms" in the kernel and ultimately leading to new protections with Linux 5.9. That NetGPU code is still being worked on by Facebook with upstream hopes but now in addition to the NVIDIA driver support they are also working on AMD GPU support with the open-source driver.

The newest Linux networking feature to get excited about that's in development is PTQ, or Per Thread Queues.

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.

Merged today to mainline for Linux 5.8 Git and also marked for back-porting is a change to make it more difficult to guess the network random number generator's internal state. It looks like it could be for a yet-to-be-published vulnerability.

One of the new network drivers now queued up for Linux 5.9 is the SFC EF100 driver for the EF100 NIC architecture.

The initial batch of WiFi/wireless driver improvements slated for Linux 5.9 landed in net-next this week with a few noteworthy additions.

Flow Queue Proportional Integral controller Enhanced (FQ-PIE) that has been mainline for a while in the Linux kernel's networking code will now be supported as an option for the default queuing discipline (qdisc) with the Linux 5.9 kernel.

The iNet wireless daemon (IWD) software developed by Intel's open-source team have released IWD 1.8.

David Miller on Tuesday sent in all of the networking subsystem updates for the Linux 5.8 kernel and there is a lot in store.

NetworkManager 1.25.2-dev is the latest development version of this important Linux networking component in the road towards NetworkManager 1.26.

There is a lot of wireless (and wired) networking activity each kernel cycle but for the upcoming Linux 5.8 merge window it looks like there will be particularly a lot for MediaTek drivers.

The Freescale "FEC" Ethernet driver used by select i.MX SoCs will be seeing better performance on the next kernel release.

Linux 5.8 will see support for next-generation Marvell/Aquantia network chipsets.

With WireGuard added to the Linux 5.6 kernel and it being back-ported to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and its tools getting packaged up by more Linux distributions, it's finally the year of WireGuard. With its usage set to skyrocket as supported kernels and the WireGuard utilities become available out-of-the-box on more distributions, there is now a WireGuard benchmark for stressing the kernel and its support.

Friday marked the release of NetworkManager 1.24-RC1 as the first test candidate for this component important to wired and wireless networking on the Linux desktop.

The networking changes for the Linux 5.7 kernel have already been merged and as usual there is a lot of new wired and wireless networking driver activity.

For those that are normally spinning their own kernels and punctually upgrading to new releases, you will want to hold off on the new Linux 5.6 kernel for the moment if you use the Intel "IWLWIFI" WiFi driver.

In-step with the Linux 5.6 release that mainlined the WireGuard kernel module for this secure VPN tunnel, WireGuard 1.0.0 has now been declared.

Should you still have an HP 100BaseVG AnyLAN network adapter from the mid-to-late 90's, the mainline Linux kernel is finally preparing to eliminate its driver.

One of the interesting innovations for the eBPF in-kernel virtual machine in recent times is the work by Google on supporting MAC and audit policy handling by it. This stems from currently custom real-time security data collection and analysis of Google servers internally for real-time threat protection and this patch-set is part of their work on allowing similar functionality in the upstream Linux kernel.

Intel's IWD wireless daemon for Linux systems has added full MAC randomization support as well as manual MAC override capabilities, similar to the MAC spoofing capabilities generally offered by other Linux networking components.

Linux 5.7's Netfilter framework is set to see better performance on modern Intel and AMD systems thanks to AVX2 optimizations.

Intel's ICE driver for the Ethernet E800 series is seeing a new member of the family come Linux 5.7.

Intel's open-source ConnMan software for managing Internet connections on Linux particularly for embedded systems has seen a new release.