Linux 7.4 Networking Brings Hardware Pacing Offload, New Drivers & More Performance

The many Linux wired and wireless networking driver improvements were merged this week for the ongoing Linux 7.4 merge window.. New to the core networking code in Linux 7.4 is for hardware pacing offload functionality. This includes a new "pacing_offload" attribute for network devices. The IDPF driver is the initial one wiring up the support for pacing offload functionality that offloads to the NIC/SmartNIC the control of timing and spacing of outgoing network packets. Also in the core networking code are improvements to throughput for mixed BIG TCP / non-big TCP code paths yielding up to 70% throughput gains. Additionally on the performance side are some TCP/IP performance improvements around efficient cache usage and reducing contention. On the Linux wireless side are some latency reduction improvements. The Linux 7.4 kernel also continues seeing more work around WiFi Aware and other WiFi 8 functionality. On the networking driver side is the initial Nebula Matrix NIX driver code plus Meta Platforms NIC "MPNIC" as the second-generation NIC out of Mesa. The first-gen Meta NIC with the FBNIC driver now has support for large IO_uring zero-copy receive buffers. The Qualcomm PPE driver added support for the IPQ5424 chipset. The Synopsys STMMAC driver added support for the RK3568 SGMII, Allwinner H616 EMAC1, UltraRISC DP1000 and Qualcomm sa8255p. On the Realtek PHY driver side is support for the RTL8261CE_CG and RTL8261D_VM. Meanwhile the Realtek RTW88 driver added support for the RTL8723BS that replaces the rudimentary rtl8723bs driver in the kernel's staging area. Lastly the Mediatek Bluetooth driver added support for the MT7928 and the Qualcomm Bluetooth code now supports the QCC2072. The full list of merged network changes for Linux 7.4 can be found via this pull request.