Many Networking Improvements Land In Linux 5.10

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Networking on 16 October 2020 at 06:06 AM EDT. 5 Comments
LINUX NETWORKING
The big networking pull request has landed in Linux 5.10 Git.

As with most kernel cycles, Linux 5.10 has a plethora of networking improvements from expanded driver coverage to new core networking features and continuing to advance the likes of (e)BPF. With Linux 5.10 some of the work includes:

- Support for shipping BPF programs with the kernel and loading them early on boot via the user-mode driver mechanism. There is also now support for sleepable BPF programs and other BPF enhancements.

- The kernel will now allow more than 255 IPv4 multi-cast interfaces.

- Continued improvements to the Multi-Path TCP (MPTCP) code.

- XDP support for the Intel IGB driver.

- The Ath11k WiFi driver now supports the QCA6390 and IPQ6018 chipsets.

- Mellanox NICs can see as much as a 20% performance improvement for packets that don't require much offloads. THis optimization is allowing multiple packets to share a descriptor entry.

- A new BPF helper that can help improve TCP back-pressure and help limit stack traversal. In a test by a developer there was a TCP stream improvement from around 10 Gbps to 15 Gbps in his configuration with virtual Ethernet drivers between containers and hosts.

- Mediatek MT76 WiFi improvements.

- Broadcom 200G Ethernet support.

More details on the Linux 5.10 networking changes via this Git merge.
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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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