The Realtek RTL8159 has been appearing in some 10G-rated USB network adapters at online retailers, some for less than $100 USD. But currently the RTL8159 is only supported by Realtek's out-of-tree Linux kernel driver, but fortunately there will be mainline support coming with the Linux 7.2 kernel this summer.
Linus Torvalds did it! He merged the pull request to rid the Linux kernel of the old Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) subsystem and various other old network drivers largely for PCMCIA era network adapters. This was the code suggested for removal given the recent influx of AI/LLM-generated bug reports against this dated code that likely has no active upstream users remaining.
It was just days ago we reported on a proposal to drop old network drivers due to AI-driven bug reports becoming a burden on upstream kernel developers. Last night that culminated with an initial pull request to clear out some old, unused networking drivers plus also clearing out the entire ISDN subsystem and more.
Merged recently to Linux Git were the big set of networking changes for the Linux 7.1 kernel.
Separate from the recently discussed work on MediaTek MT7927 "Filogic 380" support being worked on for the MT76 Linux driver (still undergoing review), a number of other MediaTek MT76 wireless driver improvements are queued up ahead of the Linux 7.1 merge window opening as soon as next week.
Sent out today were the networking subsystem fixes for the ongoing Linux 7.0 kernel. These networking fixes in time for Sunday's Linux 7.0-rc7 release include addressing performance issues within the Qualcomm Ath11k and Ath12k WiFi drivers that have always existed ever since the drivers were upstreamed.
Longtime Linux developer David Woodhouse sent out a patch series today to "deprecate legacy IP" support within the Linux kernel. While some of his commentary his April 1st-esque, he does acknowledge much of this work has merit. Ultimately it can allow for building a Linux kernel with IPv6-only support and working on allowing "legacy" IPv4 support to be disabled as part of the kernel build.
In addition to the MediaTek MT7902 WiFI Linux support emerging in recent months, the Linux support for the MediaTek MT7927 is also coming together for WiFi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 support for the upstream Linux kernel.
Released this week was Nginx 1.29.7 as the newest mainline version of this HTTP(S) web server. Releasing alongside Nginx 1.28.3 stable, it fixed buffer overflow vulnerabilities and some other vulnerabilities. Making Nginx 1.29.7 more exciting though is that it landed Multipath TCP support.
Samba continues strong in 2026 for this leading open-source SMB protocol re-implementation for Microsoft Windows file and print services interoperability. Samba 4.24 brings more features, including remote password management support.
The upcoming Linux 7.1 kernel cycle is set to retire UDP-Lite support. The UDP-Lite protocol allowed for partial checksums where potentially damaged/corrupted packets are still delivered to the application. Since the Linux 2.6.20 days there has been UDP-Lite support but the kernel is now set to retire it given breakage that has persisted for years and cleaning up the networking code can yield a performance advantage for non-UDP-Lite users.
Currently the Linux IPv6 networking stack can be built into the Linux kernel, built as a loadable kernel module, or not built at all. With proposed patches from a SUSE engineer, the IPv6 networking stack would be limited to being a kernel built-in or not at all. In doing away with IPv6 as a loadable kernel module would allow simplifying some code and lowering the Linux networking maintenance burden.
When searching for "MT7902" and "Linux" there is no shortage of users asking about Linux driver support for the Mediatek MT7902 WiFi chipset or users complaining about their MT7902 WiFi not working under Linux with that chipset found in numerous laptops in recent years. Fortunately, there is finally Linux driver support for the MT7902 surfacing for review on the Linux kernel mailing list.
Introduced to the Linux 4.12 kernel's staging area back in 2017 was the Realtek RTL8723BS WiFi driver. The Realtek RTL8723BS is an 802.11 b/g/ SDIO WLAN adapter with Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity too. In the nearly decade since this driver was added to the staging area, it's continued to be cleaned up and with the Linux 7.0 merge window there is yet again a lot of work on cleaning up this WiFi driver for the old Realtek hardware.
The Linux 7.0 networking pull request showcases two extremes and the diversity and robustness of the open-source kernel ecosystem. Linux 7.0 is laying the groundwork for WiFi 8 Ultra-High Reliability (UHR) support while this kernel version is also bidding farewell to the last Ethernet driver for use over parallel printer ports.
For those using the open-source OpenVPN for your virtual private networking (VPN) needs, OpenVPN 2.7 is out today with some notable improvements.
The core timer changes to the Linux 7.0 kernel score a rather nice performance improvement in a UDP receive network stress test from inlining a function that compilers haven't been able to tackle with their optimizations.
Merged four years ago to the Linux kernel networking subsystem's Shared Memory Communications (SMC) code was TCP Upper Layer Protocol (ULP) support for allowing applications to replace TCP with the SMC protocol in-place as a transparent replacement. Except for the next kernel cycle it's set to be reverted after realizing it's "fundamentally broken."
Slated for introduction in the next kernel cycle (Linux 6.20~7.0) is introducing large receive buffer support for IO_uring's zero-copy receive code path. This large receive buffer support can be very beneficial for those with higher-end networking hardware capable of handling the larger buffers for some significant performance and efficiency wins.
While the Linux kernel has been seeing preparations from NVIDIA for 1.6 Tb/s networking in preparing for next-generation super-computing, the kernel has still retained support to now for the High Performance Parallel Interface. HIPPI was the standard for connecting supercomputers in the late 1980s and a portion of the 1990s with being the first networking standard for near-Gigabit connectivity at 800 Mb/s over distances up to 25 meters. But HIPPI looks like it will be retired from the mainline kernel with Linux 7.0.
Queued into the Linux networking subsystem's "net-next" branch ahead of the Linux 6.20~7.0 merge window next month is cake_mq as a multi-queue aware variant of the sch_cake network scheduler. The intent with cake_mq is to better scale the network traffic rate shaper across multiple CPU cores.
Merged to Linux Git on New Year's Eve was a fix in the form of a code revert for broken MediaTek WiFi on the in-development Linux 6.19 kernel.
The Swedish VPN service Mullvad announced this week GotaTun, an open-source Rust-based WireGuard implementation that is forked from Cloudflare's BoringTun.
The big set of networking subsystem updates was recently merged for the ongoing Linux 6.19 merge window. There are some enticing core networking improvements like a big performance improvement for heavy transfer workloads, Bluetooth PAST enablement, and more. Plus a lot of wired and wireless networking driver activity and new hardware enablement.
Queued up via the Linux kernel's RDMA development Git tree is "BNG_RE" as the next-generation RoCE driver from Broadcom.
The upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel cycle is set to introduce support for the Realtek RTL8125K as a forthcoming Ethernet ASIC.
Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) usage is long obsolete even where it had enjoyed some successes in the likes of Germany and Norway. With no activity in years to the ISDN and mISDN subsystem code for the Linux kernel, a patch was sent out today for orphaning the code.
Upstreamed for the current Linux 6.18 cycle was finally having mainline support for the ESWIN EIC770 SoC with its four SiFive P550 cores plus having the DeviceTree support for the SiFive HiFive Premier P550 RISC-V development board using that SoC. Sadly not making it though for Linux 6.18 was the Ethernet controller support for the EIC7700 SoC but that is now destined to arrive in Linux 6.19.
Posted to the Linux networking mailing list on Wednesday were the latest patches for enabling the Homa transport protocol. Homa is the clean-sheet design aiming to become an alternative to TCP within data centers and capable of offering 10~100x reductions in tail latency for short messages.
Announced nearly one year ago was the OpenWrt One as a router/AP that is "hacker-friendly" and open-source. The OpenWrt One is powered by a Filogic 820 SoC and features WiFi 6. This official OpenWrt device is manufactured by Banana Pi. While there is downstream open-source code available for customizing the OpenWrt One to your heart's content, the upstream Linux kernel support to date hasn't been full-featured.
The NFS server (NFSD) improvements were merged today for the Linux 6.18 kernel. Most exciting is a new experimental feature that can help with scaling NFSD both for low-end/low-cost servers up through high-end larger server platforms.
The networking subsytem updates for Linux 6.18 have been merged. There is a lot of enticing performance optimizations in different areas of the networking stack for this new kernel. Plus new wired and wireless networking hardware support and other improvements to get excited about for this LTS kernel version.
The past several months has seen AMD engineers working on a new RDMA driver for Ionic hardware through which they acquired Pensando a few years ago. That AMD-Pensando Ionic RDMA driver is now part of the upstream Linux 6.18 kernel.
A set of patches merged via the networking pull request for the Linux 6.18 will help servers better cope with distributed denial of service "DDoS" attacks. Thanks to a Google engineer there are some significant optimizations found in the Linux 6.18 kernel code for more efficiently handling of UDP receive performance under stress, such as in DDoS scenarios.
Not to be confused with AMD's Platform Security Processor (PSP), but Google's PSP Security Protocol (PSP) for encryption in-transit for TCP network connections is now ready for the mainline kernel. This initial PSP encryption support for network connections is set to arrive with the upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel.
One of the new SoCs to be supported by the upstream Linux 6.18 kernel is the Microchip LAN969x.
Recently queued into the Linux networking subsystem's net-next branch ahead of the Linux 6.18 merge window is the Qualcomm PPE driver to support their Packet Processing Engine on select SoCs.
LF Networking, the networking group within the Linux Foundation, announced from the Open-Source Summit Europe today the release of Essedum 1.0. Essedum 1.0 is for integrating AI into networking environments.
Jakub Kicinski on Sunday sent out the big set of networking subsystem updates heading into the Linux 6.17 kernel. From high-end enterprise and data center hardware down to consumer Ethernet and WiFi devices, the Linux networking space continues to be as busy as ever.
One month ago there was the report on Phoronix of the Broadcom "BNGE" open-source driver being published for forthcoming BCM5770X networking chipsets. That new Broadcom BNGE driver is now set to be introduced in the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel for supporting the new Broadcom wired networking hardware at up to 800 Gigabit speeds.
Broadcom has been working on a new Linux Ethernet networking driver dubbed "BNGE" for supporting their new high-end BCM5770X chipset family.
The Ultra Ethernet Consortium today published the UEC Specification 1.0 release. Nearly two years ago the Ultra Ethernet Consortium was started by Intel, AMD, Meta, HPE, and others and hosted by the Linux Foundation for open and high performance networking with an emphasis on AI and HPC.
There is a lot of exciting networking changes to find with the in-development Linux 6.16 kernel both for wired and wireless devices as well as some exciting core networking improvements/optimizations.
Google engineers the past few years have been working on Device Memory TCP for the Linux kernel to allow zero-copy receive of TCP payloads to DMA-BUF regions such as device memory attached directly to a GPU or AI accelerator or other device memory accessible with DMA-BUF. For Linux 6.12 that initial Device Memory TCP receive support was merged while slated for the upcoming Linux 6.16 cycle is Device Memory TCP TX transfer support.
On the networking front with the upcoming Linux 6.16 merge window is supporting the new Realtek RTL8127A 10GbE Ethernet Controller.
Merged for Linux 6.15 was IO_uring network zero-copy receive "io_uring zcrx" while now on track for landing in Linux 6.16 is extending it to support passing DMA-BUF buffers.
The long-in-development OpenVPN DCO kernel driver for providing data channel offloading (DCO) to yield faster OpenVPN performance looks like it's now in a state for upstreaming with the Linux 6.16 kernel.
The Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP) intended for online gaming, IP telephony, multimedia streaming, and other online real-time purposes for this transport layer protocol is expected to be stripped out of the Linux kernel with the upcoming v6.16 cycle.
For those relying on OpenVPN for your virtual private networking (VPN) needs, one of the most exciting innovations in recent times besides transitioning to the WireGuard alternative is the OpenVPN DCO kernel driver. This "data channel offload" driver has the potential to provide significant performance advantages over the current OpenVPN performance.
The networking subsystem updates for the in-development Linux 6.15 kernel bring multiple nice performance optimizations to enhance Linux networking speeds. The Linux 6.15 networking pull also has support for a number of new wireless and wired network chipsets.
336 Linux Networking news articles published on Phoronix.