This presentation features a walk through the Linux kernel networking stack covering the essentials and recent developments a developer needs to know. Our starting point is the network card driver as it feeds a packet into the stack. We will follow the packet as it traverses through various subsystems such as packet filtering, routing, protocol stacks, and the socket layer. We will pause here and there to look into concepts such as segmentation offloading, TCP small queues, and low latency polling. We will cover APIs exposed by the kernel that go beyond use of write()/read() on sockets and will look into how they are implemented on the kernel side.