The biggest change in the IPFire 2.27 Core Update 159 release is a new major kernel update as the firewall/router distribution is now powered by the long-term supported Linux 5.10 LTS series, which will receive updates for five years, until December 2026.
As expected, the new kernel version brings better hardware support with its many new and updated drivers, especially network drivers, increased networking throughput through zero-copy TCP receive and UDP and Bottleneck Bandwidth and RTT congestion control (BBR) for decreased latency of the firewall in the network when forwarding packets.