Modern Intel NICs have both an updatable bootloader and firmware (NVM). Updating this can both unlock new features in OEM cards and fix various issues. If your NIC is on a motherboard or non Intel reference design you may get NVM updates via BIOS and/or a special firmware package from the vendor but likely not. This trick probably only works for cards that are based on or very close to the Intel reference design.

CAKE (Common Applications Kept Enhanced) or tc-cake is a relatively simple way of setting up AQM (Active Queue Management) on a home network. What I find quite different about cake than other such protocols is that a clear goal of this is to make it relatively easy to setup for ’normal’ people. The main reason to setup cake for me on my home network was to try reduce bufferbloat. Which is essentially a fancy term for latency increasing when networks become congested due to packets being queued sequentially.