A Big Networking Update For Linux 4.11

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Kernel on 22 February 2017 at 06:38 AM EST. 9 Comments
LINUX KERNEL
David Miller has mailed out the rather big set of updates to the networking subsystem for the Linux 4.11 kernel.

The networking pull request is another significant update. Among the changes that jump out include landing SipHash for greater security in the kernel. The initial SIPHASH usage is for secure sequence numbers and syncookies.

The networking updates for Linux 4.11 also have reduced CPU usage for ICMP replies that are going to be limited or suppressed, a Shared Memory Communications socket layer, improved inet port bind conflict handling, TX batching in vhost_net, continued BPF work, support for port mirroring in the b53 driver, and much more.

For more details on the Shared Memory Communications (SMC) addition, see the patch series. From there, "Shared Memory Communications-RDMA" (SMC-R) protocol as defined in RFC7609. While SMC-R does not aim to replace TCP, it taps a wealth of existing data center TCP socket applications to become more efficient without the need for rewriting them. SMC-R uses RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) to save CPU consumption. For instance, when running 10 parallel connections with uperf, we measured a decrease of 60% in CPU consumption with SMC-R compared to TCP/IP."

New networking drivers include an Aquantia driver and IPVTAP IP-VLAN based tap driver. The Aquantia driver is for aQuantia AQC107/AQC108 network devices.

The complete list of networking changes for Linux 4.11 via this pull request.
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