Almost 5 months and 308 commits after the release of NetworkManager 1.50, the new version NetworkManager 1.52 has been released.

Let’s see what’s new in this new release.

Autotools had been deprecated in favour of meson in NetworkManager 1.48. Now it has been removed entirely, so meson is the only supported build system to build the project.

Support for IPVLAN devices

IPVLAN devices are similar to MACVLAN and used in similar scenarios, Now they can be created and managed from NetworkManager directly.

Slowly advancing towards IPv6-only

IPv4 is not dead yet, and maybe it will never be, but the support towards IPv6-only networks advances. In this case, NetworkManager’s DHCP client can now honor the “IPv6-only preferred” option from DHCPv4. Users willing to use IPv6 only whenever is possible can enable the ipv4.dhcp-ipv6-only-preferred property for it.

“IPv6-only preferred” is a DHCPv4 option that DHCP clients can use to negotiate with the DHCP server about using only IPv6. It needs to be enabled both in the client and the server, ensuring that IPv4 will still be used if any of them cannot honor this setting.

Routed DNS

Enabling the ipv4.routed-dns and ipv6.routed-dns in a device’s connection will instruct NetworkManager to configure a special routing to make that each name server will only be reached via the device that specifies it. Without routed DNS the DNS queries are sent via any connected device.

DNS over TLS

Continuing with the improvements in security on DNS, NetworkManager now supports specifying DNS servers with DNS over TLS (DoT). This is in its initial stage of development and currently is only supported using the dnsconfd backend, a new daemon to manage the system’s DNS configuration. Check the NetworkManager.conf man page to see how to configure it.

Support for Oracle cloud (OCI) in nm-cloud-setup

The nm-cloud-setup tool, the tool used in cloud environments to automatically apply the network configuration from the cloud provider, now supports the OCI provider.

What else?

• Added a new ipv4.link-local=fallback property to set an IPv4 link-local address only if no other address is set.
• Support for ethtool FEC.
• Allow to configure the DHCP addresses range in “shared” connections.
• Drop support for the “dhcpcanon” DHCP client.
• Added the “shared” method to the IPv6 configuration options in nmtui.
• Many other small changes and bugfixes.

Acknowledgements

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

Amelia Miner, Andika Triwidada, Andreas Hartmann, Beniamino Galvani, Dan Williams, Dominique Martinet, eaglegai, Fernando Fernandez Mancera, Filip Pokryvka, Georg Müller, Gris Ge, Íñigo Huguet, Jan Vaclav, Jason A. Donenfeld, Jonathan Lebon, Josef Ouano, Lubomir Rintel, Luna D Dragon, Martin von Gagern, Richard Acayan, Roman Pavelka, Till Maas, Tim Sabsch, Tomas Korbar, Valentin Blot, Vladimír Beneš, Wen Lian and Yuki Inoguchi.

Also thanks to our Quality Engineers from Red Hat for all the testing: Vladimír Beneš, Filip Pokryvka and Mingyu Shi.

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. (IMPORTANT: as we announced in the mailing list the download page has changed its location and now the tarballs are released directly in our Gitlab repository).

Thanks for tuning in and goodbye!