NetworkManager 1.7.2 development release ready for testing

Mar 27, 2017 01:40 GMT  ·  By

Lubomir Rintel announced that the development of the NetworkManager 1.8 major release kicked off with the availability of the first snapshot, versioned 1.7.2, for public testing.

NetworkManager 1.7.2 is out and is a development release that lets us get an early taste of what's coming in the stable NetworkManager 1.8 build. Among the biggest new features added so far, we can mention support for handling PINs for PKCS#11 tokens as secrets and implementation of an MTU property for both CDMA and GSM connections.

There's also a new option that allows users to disable selected Transport Layer Security (TLS) versions during EAP (Extensible Authentication Protocol) phase 1 authentication, as well as support for configuring the 802.1x authentication timeout to allow for faster fallback to other available network connections.

Settings of bonding devices can be modified on the fly

Another interesting change coming to the major NetworkManager 1.8 release is that the settings of bonding devices can be modified on the fly, which means that there's no need to re-enable the connection anymore. Additionally, it looks like teaming devices will support setting a hardcoded MAC address.

NetworkManager 1.8 also introduces support for creating and managing dummy links, improves the detection of EAP-FAST support in wpa_supplicant, removes the dependency on the libgudev library, and switches to the libsoup library instead of libcurl for checking connectivity with the ultimate goal of having a smaller dependency footprint.

Other than that, it will disable the Reverse Path filtering functionality in multihoming configurations to no longer conflict with authorized network traffic, and avoids creating a symlink for /etc/resolv.conf if there's already a file on the target system when using the "rc-manager=symlink" DNS mode.

The full changelog of the NetworkManager 1.7.2 development release is attached below if you're curious to know what's been fixed or implemented so far, and you can also download the source tarball right now from our website if you want to test drive it on your favorite GNU/Linux distribution.

NetworkManager 1.7.2 Changelog