WireGuard Secure Network Tunnel Is Eyeing Mainline, Running On Android

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Networking on 1 January 2017 at 09:32 AM EST. 4 Comments
LINUX NETWORKING
Back in June we reported on WireGuard as a next-generation secure network tunnel for the Linux kernel. We haven't heard much on WireGuard in recent months, but this New Year's morning we received a message from their lead developer with a status update.

WireGuard creator Jason Donenfeld emailed into Phoronix an update on the WireGuard project with their accomplishments for 2016 and a look ahead to 2017.
Just to give you an end of year update on the WireGuard project -- it's coming along amazingly. We've made massive progress in the few short months of the end of 2016, since we released. We're now officially supported in several major distributions -- Debian, Arch, Gentoo, OpenWRT/LEDE, NixOS, Exherbo, Homebrew, and some other esoteric distributions -- as well as community-produced packages for Ubuntu (ppa), Fedora/CentOS (copr), and OpenSUSE (obs). For an out of tree kernel module, this is the fastest adoption I've ever seen, I think, because people really seem hungry for WireGuard; it evidently solves a real need folks have. We've been releasing snapshots every week or every two weeks with the latest improvements, and every commit is built and tested in QEMU for every supported kernel.org kernel, thanks to our automatic build infrastructure. OpenWRT/LEDE now has full integration into their networking system and GUI, NixOS has it integrated into their declarative system configuration, there's an open pull request to make this part of systemd-networkd, and somebody told me the other day they're working on a NetworkManager plugin. It's being actively used now by people with tiny routers in mesh networks who need to squeeze every morsel of performance from their tiny device, as well as on massive 40GbE servers in data centers for making secure encrypted links. For a young project, I'm quite pleased. Last week I got a new phone, and so WireGuard was ported to 3.18, which is the kernel Qualcomm chose for their Android chipsets, so now WireGuard runs on Android.

In 2017, we'll be marching steadily ahead toward mainline kernel inclusion. There have been a lot of great discussions between the mainline community and WireGuard, and so I expect we'll have success down the road. Exciting things to come.

Jason
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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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