A bit more than 3 months and 257 commits since NetworkManager 1.46, a new release is ready: NetworkManager 1.48.

Let’s take a look at the most interesting parts!

Building with autotools is now deprecated and will be completely removed in the next development cycle. We recommend using meson to build NetworkManager, for basic setup, see the CONTRIBUTING.md file.

Deprecate mac-address-blacklist property

NetworkManager is embracing conscious language, as part of this work, we have deprecated 802-11-wireless and 802-11-wired property mac-address-blacklist in favor of mac-address-denylist. We encourage you to migrate to the new property as soon as possible.

Support changing the OpenSSL ciphers for 802.1X authentication

OpenSSL sometimes moves ciphers among SECLEVELs. Some servers are too old to support newer ciphers so an expert should be allowed to define the ciphers for the connection. Therefore, now it is possible to change the OpenSSL ciphers for 802.1X authentication via connection property 802-1x.openssl-ciphers.

What else?

Allow IPv6 SLAAC and static IPv6 DNS server assignment for modem broadband when IPv6 device address was not explicitly passed on by ModemManager.

Support sending DHCP RELEASE message when bringing down the connection.

Support setting IPv6 preferred and valid lifetime of autogenerated temporary addresses.

Fix a performance issue that was leading to a 100% CPU usage by NetworkManager if external programs were doing a big amount of routes updates.

Fix detection of 6 GHz band capability for WiFi devices.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to all contributors who provided feedback, ideas or patches.

Alex Henrie, Beniamino Galvani, Christian K, emintufan, Fernando Fernandez Mancera, Gris Ge, Íñigo Huguet, Jan Vaclav, Javier Sánchez Parra, jtux270, Lubomir Rintel, Luna Jernberg, Pavel Valach, Sergey Koshelenko, Stanislas Faye, Thomas Haller, Till Maas, Tomas Ebenlendr, Tomasz Kłoczko, Wen Liang, Yegor Yefremov.

Also thanks to our Quality Engineers from Red Hat for all the testing: Vladimír Beneš, Filip Pokryvka, David Jasa and Matej Berezny.

Join us on our GitLab project.

Get the new release

As usual, the next release of your favorite Linux distribution will surely ship the new version.

In case you’re too impatient to wait, or you are, in fact, responsible for keeping NetworkManager up to date in a distribution, get the tarball from our download page.

Thanks for tuning in and goodbye!