IPFire 2.27 - Core Update 160 is available for testing. IPFire is a powerful and professional Open Source firewall solution.

IPFire 2.27 - Core Update 160 available for testing

This is the announcement for IPFire 2.27 - Core Update 160 which is available for testing. It comes with a large number of bug fixes and package updates and prepare for removing Python 2 which has reached its end of life.

Improving Network Throughput

In recent days and months, the development team has spent a lot of time on finding bottlenecks and removing those. Our goal is to increase throughput on hardware and bringing latency down, for a faster network.

This update brings a first change which will enable network interfaces that support it, to send packets that belong to the same stream to the same processor core. This allows taking advantage of better cache locality and the firewall engine as well as the Intrusion Prevention System benefit from this, especially with a large number of connections and especially on hardware with smaller CPU caches.

This feature is automatically enabled on all hardware that supports it.

Removing Python 2

Python 2 has reached its  end-of-life (EOL) at January 1st, 2021. In the past months and years, we have moved our own code to Python 3 which has been completed with this update.

However, Python 2 is still present in the distribution for all users who still have to port any custom scripts. With the next Core Update, we will remove Python 2 which means that you have to act now to port any custom scripts written in Python 2.

IPFire 2.27 - Core Update 160 available for testing - The IPFire Blog