For those making use of OpenVPN for your virtual private network (VPN) needs, years in the making has been an "OVPN" Linux kernel driver to enhance the performance by offloading more of the work to kernel-space.

OpenVPN is a user-space program but in development the past several years has been the OVPN kernel driver for data channel offloading to allow for more of the data channel processing to happen within kernel space. The OVPN driver appears as a simple virtual network device driver and allows more of the VPN network processing to be handled within the kernel.

This driver has been [1]in development for several years and today brought the eighth iteration of the patches. With the v8 patches there are various changes to the Netlink API used by the OVPN driver and other updates. This driver continues to be worked on by OpenVPN Inc directly.

Benchmarks previously posted by OpenVPN Inc show the big performance uplift brought by the kernel Data Channel Offload (DCO) capabilities:

Those interested in this OpenVPN "OVPN" Linux kernel driver that aims to eventually get into the mainline Linux kernel can find the v8 patches on the [2]Linux kernel mailing list for review.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/OpenVPN-DCO-Kernel

[2] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20241002-b4-ovpn-v8-0-37ceffcffbde@openvpn.net/