Firewalld was started by Red Hat a decade ago for managing Linux firewall functionality with Netfilter. Ten and a half years after the first release, Firewalld 1.0 was released this afternoon.

Linux 5.15 later this year will bring improvements to the kernel side of Open vSwitch, the open-source virtual multi-layer switch implementation that is commonly used in large virtualized environments.

Given the dominance of Linux-based devices from embedded/mobile (Android) through data centers and Linux powering all sorts of equipment, the networking subsystem updates for new Linux kernel merge windows continues to be very lively with new hardware support and never-ending improvements and new features.

The Firewalld firewall management tool for Linux that is built around Netfilter/Nftables is preparing for its long awaited 1.0 release.

Adding to other networking changes queuing up for the upcoming Linux 5.14 cycle, NVMeTCP Offload has begun landing into "net-next" ahead of this next kernel merge window.

The Linux 5.14 kernel this summer will feature improved support for a new MikroTik 10G/25G NIC.

Last week the big set of networking subsystem updates were submitted and merged for the ongoing Linux 5.13 merge window.

Realtek has contributed support for the RTL8153C and RTL8156 Ethernet chipsets to their "r8152" USB network driver for the upcoming Linux 5.13 cycle.

Hitting the Linux networking subsystem's "net-next" branch on Friday was the long in development WWAN subsystem/framework.

Linaro continues leading the effort on a Wireless WAN (WWAN) subsystem/framework for the Linux kernel.

In addition to the legacy IDE driver code ready to go from the mainline Linux kernel, receiving its final death sentence now is also the WiMAX support.

It's been three years that Retpolines (return trampolines) have been around as part of the Spectre defenses on Linux and kernel developers in particular are still working to better optimize different areas of their code to deal with the performance overhead incurred.

Samsung for some time now has been working on an in-kernel SMB3 protocol implementation for file sharing across the network with "CIFSD" and it's now been queued into Linux-Next meaning it will likely go for mainline in a coming cycle.

David Miller sent in the big batch of networking improvements today for the ongoing Linux 5.12 merge window.

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.