Two months and a half after the previous release, NetworkManager 1.30 has seen the light today. The development cycle was shorter compared to past releases and therefore the list of new features is not as exciting as usual. There is however interesting stuff worth mentioning.

Create your veth interfaces with NM

A virtual Ethernet (veth) is a special kind of network interface supported by the Linux kernel. It is virtual because it doesn’t represent a hardware device. You can create veths only in pairs and all the traffic sent through one interface is received by the other veth.

Until now NM treated a veth interface like a normal Ethernet. It was possible to activate a connection profile of type ethernet on an existing veth and NM would bring the interface up and start DHCP (or set up static addresses).

Users can now also create a veth pair through NetworkManager, by adding a new connection profile of type veth. The connection needs a veth.peer property that specifies the name of the peer interface to create.

Stronger security for WPA3-Enterprise

WPA3 (Wi-Fi Protected Access 3) is the latest version of the standard developed by the Wi-Fi Alliance to secure wireless networks.

Among other things, it specifies a new authentication protocol (SAE, Simultaneous Authentication of Equals) to be used in WPA-Personal mode; NetworkManager already supports SAE since version 1.16.

Another addition of WPA3 is a new security level to be used with WPA-Enterprise that guarantees higher security by only allowing protocols with a minimum strength of 192 bits. This new WPA-Enterprise 192-bit mode can now be configured in NetworkManager by setting the wifi-security.key-mgmt property to WPA-EAP-SUITE-B-192.

initrd generator improvements

Since version 1.16, NetworkManager provides a connection generator tool that parses the kernel command line in the initramfs and creates a list of connection profiles that NetworkManager can activate during early stages of the boot.

This tool has seen a lot of improvements recently, including many bug fixes and new features. Among them, there is the support for the rd.net.timeout.carrier and rd.net.dhcp.retry kernel command line arguments. The generator now also accepts a new link6 autoconfiguration mode in ip= arguments to use only link-local IPv6 addressing.

A new libnm API to read and write connection profiles

This item is particularly interesting for developers. libnm is a library to interact with NetworkManager and provides an API based on objects (Devices, Connections, Settings, IP Configurations, etc.) that can be easily used to discover and change the network configuration, hiding the complexity of the D-Bus API of NetworkManager.

In this new release, libnm provides functions to read and write connection profiles in the keyfile format, the one used natively by NetworkManager. Check the example!

Conclusion

This is an incomplete list of some of the changes introduced by the new 1.30 release. For the full list please see the NEWS file.

And, as always, thanks to everybody who contributed.