BPF Timers To Intel Additions Lead The Networking Changes With Linux 5.15

The networking subsystem updates for the recently opened Linux 5.15 merge window have landed.

Among the work exciting me with the networking changes in Linux 5.15 includes:

- Support for BPF timers along with a variety of other BPF enhancements.

- Initial support for Intel's unreleased "Bz" WiFi hardware to IWLWIFI. The Intel IWLWIFI driver also now supports scanning of hidden 6GHz networks.

- On the Intel wired side is initial support for Lunar Lake with their e1000e driver.

- The Intel Gigabit Ethernet driver IGC also now supports Credit-Based Shaper (CBS) offloading for hardware traffic prioritization and bandwidth reservation. This IGC driver support works with Intel hardware at least of the i225 controller.

- Support for MCTP as the Management Component Transport Protocol. The Management Component Transport Protocol is defined by the Distributed Management Task Force for communicating between relevant controllers and their devices. MCTP can work with buses such as PCI Express, USB, I2C, SMBus, and others while being relevant not only for servers but also embedded devices. Intel NICs have been among the devices supporting MCTP over PCI Express now for a number of years.

- The addition of the LiteETH network driver as part of the LiteX work for FPGA cores.

- The Renesas "RAVB" driver gains support for Gigabit Ethernet IP.

- More scalable and reliable Open vSwitch.

- The Xen netfront code has been hardened against malicious back-ends.

A full list of the networking feature changes for Linux 5.15 can be found via this pull request that as of a few hours ago was successfully merged to mainline.