[ANNOUNCE] WireGuardNT, a high-performance WireGuard implementation for the Windows kernel

[Jason A. Donenfeld]

Hi everyone,

On Mon, Aug 2, 2021 at 7:28 PM Jason A. Donenfeld <Jason at zx2c4.com> wrote:
> Nonetheless, experimental or not, we still need people to test this and help
> shake out issues. To that end, WireGuardNT is now available in the ordinary
> WireGuard for Windows client -- https://www.wireguard.com/install/ -- with the
> 0.4.z series, in addition to having full support of the venerable wg(8)
> utility, but currently (August 2021; if you're reading this in the future this
> might not apply) it is behind a manually set registry knob. There will be
> three phases of the 0.4.z series:
>
>   Phase 1) WireGuardNT is hidden behind the "ExperimentalKernelDriver"
>            registry knob. If you don't manually tinker around to enable it,
>            the client will continue to use wireguard-go/Wintun like before.

After the first few days, bug reports for WireGuardNT have died down
considerably. It's hard to tell whether that's a sign that the
software is stable or that nobody is using it. So, we're still in
phase 1. However, with version 0.4.5 of the client, I've added a
checkbox below the "activate" button in order to make the experimental
testing more discoverable. I dislike such knobs, but I'd rather have
more testing than less, before turning it on by default. Hopefully
this will make it easier for alpha testers to give it a spin and
report findings. If you have been testing the driver, and it's been
working well for you, please write in to say so, simply as a signal
that it is being tested. If things stay as quiet as they are now on
the bug reporting front, we'll likely move into phase 2 -- enabling
WireGuardNT by default, with a registry key to revert to the legacy
implementation -- in 2 to 3 weeks.

Jason