The IPFire team released IPFire 2.27 Core Update 160. The latest version comes with multiple bug fixes and package updates. Core Update 160 also prepare for removing Python 2 which reached EOL in January of 2021.
Network throughput
The development team stated that they are looking for new ways to find bottlenecks and removing them to increase throughput on hardware and bringing latency down, for a faster network. The new update enables network interfaces that support it, to send packets that belong to the same stream to the same processor core. This feature enables taking advantage of better cache locality, the firewall engine and the Intrusion Prevention System benefit, especially with a large number of connections on hardware with smaller CPU caches.
The team also moved its code to Phyton 3 in the new update. But Python 2 is still included for the users who still port custom scripts. In the next update, Python 2 will be removed completely, thus, users should port custom scripts written in Python 2 as soon as possible.