Many Networking Changes Queued For Linux 4.16, New "Netdevsim" Driver

David Miller has presented the set of networking subsystem changes targeting the Linux 4.16 and once again it's on the heavier side.

First up on the networking side of Linux 4.16 is a new driver: netdevsim. This "netdevsim" as implied by the name is a tool for network developers and is a simulator. This simulated networking device is used for testing various networking APIs and at this time is particularly focused on testing hardware offloading related interfaces. This network device simulator has already been extended to support loading (e)BPF programs and other developer-focused functionality.

In addition to this testing driver, the networking code for Linux 4.16 has seen a rework to its core networking routing structures. Reducing the size of these core data structures is in the name of performance with conserving memory and hopefully less cache misses. Several structs have seen their size reduced 48~64 bytes.

The Linux 4.16 networking code also has lockless qdisc support, SCTP stream interleave support, smoother TCP receive auto-tuning, various hardware offloading improvements, TCP BPF improvements, and improvements to a number of the individual network drivers.

The complete list of networking changes at this time via LKML.