Linux 6.16 Networking Brings Some Big Performance Improvements & OpenVPN Driver
([Linux Networking] 5 Hours Ago
Linux 6.16 Networking)
- Reference: 0001549999
- News link: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.16-Networking
- Source link:
There is a lot of exciting networking changes to find with the in-development Linux 6.16 kernel both for wired and wireless devices as well as some exciting core networking improvements/optimizations.
The networking pull request is now merged for the Linux 6.16. As usual there is a ton of networking changes this cycle due to the widespread use of Linux from embedded and consumer devices up through hyper-scaler servers with very high-end networking gear. Some of the core networking improvements for Linux 6.16 include:
- [1]Implementing the Device Memory TCP transmit path to allow zero-copy data transmissions on top of TCP from device memory like GPU vRAM directly to the network.
- After moving all of the IPv6 routing tables management outside the RTNL scope and under its own lock and RCU, the remote control path is now three times faster.
- Improved TCP receiver buffer auto-tuning and increased default upper-bound for the receive buffer, to yield around a throughput improvement of over 60% on a single flow maximum throughput test using a 200Gb link.
- Improved control plane scalability.
- Optimizations to the GRO engine for UDP-tunneled traffic to yield around a 10% improvement in stream related tests.
- [2]Retiring the Datagram Congestion Control Protocol "DCCP".
On the networking driver side for Linux 6.16 there is:
- [3]The OpenVPN DCO driver was finally merged ! This can yield [4]much faster performance for OpenVPN virtual private networking by offloading the data channel processing to kernel-space.
- Realtek MT9888 2.5G Ethernet device driver is merged.
- An AMD Renoir Ethernet device driver is merged.
- The Aeonsemi 10G C45 PHY driver is another new addition to the networking subsystem.
- The NVIDIA Mellanox MLX5 driver has refactored the stearing table handling code to significantly reduce the amount of memory used.
- The Intel IDPF driver has merged initial RDMA support as well as PTP support.
- The Realtek rtl8211 driver added Wake-On-LAN magic packet support.
- Loongson 2K3000 support within the Synopsys STMMAC driver.
- WiFi mac80211 wireless scan improvements for Multi-Link Operation (MLO) mode.
- WiFi 7 improvements for the Mediatek MT76 driver as well as enabling MT7990 chipset support.
- The Realtek RTW88 driver is enjoying improved throughput for the RTL8814AU chipset.
- The Realtek RTW89 driver added Multi-Link Operation (MLO) support.
- HCI driver protocol support for Bluetooth.
More details on all of the Linux 6.16 networking changes via [5]this pull .
[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Device-Memory-TCP-TX-Linux-6.16
[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.16-Net-Next-Drops-DCCP
[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/OpenVPN-DCO-In-Net-Next-6.16
[4] https://www.phoronix.com/news/OpenVPN-DCO-Kernel
[5] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250528135941.50128-1-pabeni@redhat.com/
The networking pull request is now merged for the Linux 6.16. As usual there is a ton of networking changes this cycle due to the widespread use of Linux from embedded and consumer devices up through hyper-scaler servers with very high-end networking gear. Some of the core networking improvements for Linux 6.16 include:
- [1]Implementing the Device Memory TCP transmit path to allow zero-copy data transmissions on top of TCP from device memory like GPU vRAM directly to the network.
- After moving all of the IPv6 routing tables management outside the RTNL scope and under its own lock and RCU, the remote control path is now three times faster.
- Improved TCP receiver buffer auto-tuning and increased default upper-bound for the receive buffer, to yield around a throughput improvement of over 60% on a single flow maximum throughput test using a 200Gb link.
- Improved control plane scalability.
- Optimizations to the GRO engine for UDP-tunneled traffic to yield around a 10% improvement in stream related tests.
- [2]Retiring the Datagram Congestion Control Protocol "DCCP".
On the networking driver side for Linux 6.16 there is:
- [3]The OpenVPN DCO driver was finally merged ! This can yield [4]much faster performance for OpenVPN virtual private networking by offloading the data channel processing to kernel-space.
- Realtek MT9888 2.5G Ethernet device driver is merged.
- An AMD Renoir Ethernet device driver is merged.
- The Aeonsemi 10G C45 PHY driver is another new addition to the networking subsystem.
- The NVIDIA Mellanox MLX5 driver has refactored the stearing table handling code to significantly reduce the amount of memory used.
- The Intel IDPF driver has merged initial RDMA support as well as PTP support.
- The Realtek rtl8211 driver added Wake-On-LAN magic packet support.
- Loongson 2K3000 support within the Synopsys STMMAC driver.
- WiFi mac80211 wireless scan improvements for Multi-Link Operation (MLO) mode.
- WiFi 7 improvements for the Mediatek MT76 driver as well as enabling MT7990 chipset support.
- The Realtek RTW88 driver is enjoying improved throughput for the RTL8814AU chipset.
- The Realtek RTW89 driver added Multi-Link Operation (MLO) support.
- HCI driver protocol support for Bluetooth.
More details on all of the Linux 6.16 networking changes via [5]this pull .
[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Device-Memory-TCP-TX-Linux-6.16
[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.16-Net-Next-Drops-DCCP
[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/OpenVPN-DCO-In-Net-Next-6.16
[4] https://www.phoronix.com/news/OpenVPN-DCO-Kernel
[5] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250528135941.50128-1-pabeni@redhat.com/
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