A Wi-Fi Christmas Coming In The Summer!

While many of the hardcore Linux users may already be aware of this, most of you are not likely. There is going to be a ton of networking additions coming in the 2.6.30 kernel. New support for a number of 802.11n wireless devices, most of them coming from the Atheros side of things, plus a lot of clean up for existing wireless chipsets such as work coming from Intel’s own Wi-Fi devices.

On the LAN front, work is being included better support for Generic Receive Offload (GRO) infrastructure for many LAN drivers out there. This will of course translate into good things for those using affected chipsets. At the end of the day, it is safe to say this is going to be a very network oriented kernel release. And overall, I see this as a very good thing.

Of course, what Linux article would be complete without a discussion on wireless packet sniffing. In the video above, Chris takes a crack at what it is, how it works and what to do about preventing it harming your network.