The abundance of networking subsystem updates have been mailed in for the [1]Linux 6.13 kernel from wired and wireless driver enhancements to core networking code improvements.

There's a lot of networking changes as usual each kernel cycle given the wide variety of wired and wireless hardware that sees usage under Linux. Some of the Linux 6.13 networking highlights include:

- There is a "very large" effort underway to make the RTNL lock scope per network-namespace to significantly reduce locking contention in containerized use-cases.

- The Realtek RTW88 WiFi driver now supports the Realtek 8821AU and 8812AU USB adapters.

- The Realtek RTW89 WiFi driver adds thermal protection handling. This thermal protection support is to prevent chip overheading by reducing TX duty when the temperature is over threshold.

- A 4-tuple hash has been added for connected UDP sockets to significantly speed-up the look ups of connected sockets.

- The VirtIO network driver (virtio-net) now supports AF_XDP zero-copy for zero-copy support to yield better performance within virtualized environments.

- HiSilicon driver support for BMC Gigabit Ethernet.

- INET/INETV6 address hashing has been made less predictable.

- Optimizations within Netfilter to reduce memory consumption.

- Arcadyan ARV45XX AR2417 & Gigaset SX76[23] AR241[34]A support within the ath5k WiFi driver.

- Big TCP GSO support for WireGuard for handling BIG TCP in WireGuard that can help improve performance. The patch notes a reported 15% improvement in TCP stream performance for WireGuard from the one line of code change.

More details on all of the networking changes for the Linux 6.13 kernel via [2]this pull request .



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Linux+6.13

[2] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20241119161923.29062-1-pabeni@redhat.com/T/#u