Kernel 6 Massive Network Improvement for ASUS

[EnlightenedBacon]

Just thought I'd put a note here for anyone interested, as I noticed something that made a huge improvement to my productivity.

I have two ASUS laptops (ROG Strix SCAR III, and Zephyrus S17), one I use at home, one I use in the office. 90% of my work involves RDS into servers on the other side of the world from me. Performance was always slow, so I just got used to it. I did notice on Windows using an entirely different VPN config, it was faster, but not enough to care.

A couple of weeks ago I updated my home laptop to Kernel 6 (using the OEM package) in order to try and fix some other minor issues I was having. Suddenly I noticed my RDS performance vastly improved. It went from some clicks taking up to 5 seconds to register, to everything under 1 second. I assumed this was just coincidence, something on my network, or the network on the other end, but it stayed as good for weeks.

So today in the office I tried going on RDS and it was slow as usual (different Internet connection obviously, but better than what I have at home being gigabit both ways). So i figured why not try a Kernel 6 update. So I installed it, rebooted and now it is as fast as at home. Also it affects Wifi and Ethernet the same way, both are vastly quicker now. I only notice the difference when using RDS though, general network performance, gaming and so on seems identical.

Obviously it could be Kernel 5.16, 17, 18, 19 or 6 where the change actually occurred, AFAIK 5.17 introduced some major networking updates. And of course I have no idea if this affects all Kernel 5.15 systems, or only some ASUS laptops. Regardless, I almost stopped going into the office because of the speed difference, and it was the install of Kernel 6 that fixed it. Hopefully that helps someone else too.

[stevengarland]

Yes!
I am using kernel 6.0.9 and "trusting Linus" . While one should be cautious, you can always (hopefully) revert. I have a second laptop so I am never out of business. To me this is part of the fun of using Linux Mint.

[t42]

There were several RDS related kernel improvements recently, such as support for IPv6 addresses and RDS large fragment size implementation.

[EnlightenedBacon]

There were several RDS related kernel improvements recently, such as support for IPv6 addresses and RDS large fragment size implementation.

Do you know which kernel version they were released in? They make a MASSIVE difference! I prefer not using non standard kernels, but in this case the difference is way too big to miss.

[t42]

5.19 was released with major networking improvements. But even better is 6.1 release, at last with MGLRU.