Many Networking Improvements & New Wired/Wireless Devices For Linux 6.9

The big set of networking subsystem updates have been sent in for the Linux 6.9 merge window including a number of new wired and wireless devices being supported as well as a number of core networking improvements and optimizations.

The networking subsystem pull request continues to be quite extensive given the ever-growing number of wired and wireless devices out there and the wide span of Linux appearing everywhere from routers and small embedded network devices up through desktops and beefy servers and all sorts of other environments. Some of the Linux 6.9 networking highlights include:

- Intel E825-C network device support within the ICE driver.

- BPF token support to delegate a subset of BPF subsystem functionality from privileged system-wide daemons (like systemdd) through specialized mount options for userns-bound BPF file-system to a trusted and unprivileged application.

- SPP-AMSDU support for Signaling and Payload Protected Aggregate MAC Service Data Unit for increasing WiFi throughput.

- Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) wider bandwidth support as needed by WiFi Extremely High Throughput (EHT).

- The Intel IWLWIFI driver now supports A-MSDUs, wider-bandwidth OFDMA, and support for new devices.

- Linux's Energy Efficient Ethernet code has been improved to allow 2.5GE and 5GE link modes as well as other improvements.

- Support for attaching arbitrary metadata to netconsole messages.

- Multi-Path TCP (MPTCP) now supports the TCP_NOTSENT_LOWAT socket option.

- Various improvements to reduce locking pressure with rtnl_lock.

- A new driver for Marvell Octeon PCI Endpoint NIC VF.

- The NVIDIA Mellanox code now supports devices with one port and multiple PCIe links.

- The AMD Pensando network driver has seen many optimizations for better performance and memory savings.

- The Qualcomm Ath11k driver now supports Low Power Indoor (LPI), Standard Power (SP), and Very Low Power (VLP) 6GHz station power modes. QCA2066 support is also added to the Ath11k driver.

- The Qualcomm Ath12k driver has prepared for Multi-Link Operation support, Power Saver Mode in station mode, and P2P support for the WCN7850.

- The Realtek RTW88 WiFi driver now supports more rtw8811cu and rtw8821cu devices.

See the pull request for the full list of networking feature updates set for Linux 6.9.