The recently released Linux 6.4 kernel is making some big networking strides that end users, enterprises and service providers will benefit from in the months to come.

The Linux kernel offers essential capabilities for running operations that are widely used in networking equipment, enterprise, telco and the cloud. The kernel is part of a larger Linux operating system, with various vendors offering supported distributions including Red Hat, SUSE, and Canonical. Linux kernel development follows a rapid pace with new releases every six to ten weeks.

Among the key networking features in Linux 6.4 are multiple improvements to improve traffic flow, extended support for Wi-Fi 7 wireless networking, new eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filter) features and IPv6 optimizations.

Wi-Fi 7 is the next major protocol for wireless networking. Technically known as the IEEE 802.11be, Wi-Fi 7 is still in development with full standardization not expected until 2024. Ahead of the final specification, vendors like Broadcom have been pushing out silicon and the Linux kernel community and its contributors including Intel and MediaTek are racing to bake support for Wi-Fi 7 into Linux.

With the Linux 6.4 kernel, the Intel "iwlwifi" and the  MediaTek MT76 drivers have been added providing Wi-Fi 7 support for supported devices and silicon from those vendors. Additionally support has been added to the Linux kernel for Wi-Fi 7 mesh mode, enabling distributed wireless deployments in the future.

The Linux 6.4 kernel also brings a new scheduling system that helps to manage and optimize how network packet traffic delivery is handled.

The fair capacity scheduler is a new feature that makes use of the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) that is implemented in Linux. The code commit message for the new feature explains that the new scheduler enables a fair capacity distribution between streams.

"This scheduler considers the lengths of the messages of each stream and schedules them in a specific way to maintain an equal capacity for all streams," the code commit states. "The details are implementation dependent, interleaving user messages allows for a better realization of the fair capacity usage."

Additionally SCTP in Linux 6.4 will benefit from the new weighted fair queuing stream scheduler. The code commit for the new features notes that, "… this  scheduler considers the lengths of the messages of each stream and schedules them in a specific way to use the capacity according to the given weights."

Linux 6.4 also integrates a few updates to help improve traffic routing for IPv6 addresses.

IPv6 is the next generation internet protocol address method, consisting of a 128-bit address. In contrast, IPv4 which is still widely used only has a 32 bit address.Among the IPv6 updates is new code to optimize traffic route lookup. Additionally the bridge netfilter component, that provides packet filtering and network address translation (NAT) capabilities can now better handle IPv6 Jumbo packets. IPv6 jumbo packets are larger-than-normal packets designed to enhance network efficiency by reducing transmission overhead.