Half a year and 796 commits since NetworkManager 1.42, a new release is ready: NetworkManager 1.44.

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

The ifcfg-rh plugin is deprecated

The ifcfg-rh plugin is deprecated; it will only receive bugfixes and no new features. A warning is emitted to the log when a connection in ifcfg-rh format is found.

In addition, to automatically migrate existing ifcfg-rh connections to the keyfile format, a new configuration option main.migrate-ifcfg-rh is provided. Migration is disabled by default, but the default value can be changed at build time via --with-config-migrate-ifcfg-rh-default=yes. We strongly recommend all the packagers and distributions to enable this option by default as ifcfg-rh is now deprecated.

Disable Wi-Fi and WWAN radio in nmtui

nmtui is a screen-oriented configuration tool for NetworkManager. It is not powerful as nmcli but it is very useful for non-command-line-tool oriented users.

Now it is possible to disable Wi-Fi and WWAN radio using the nmtui client.

What else?

Now the number of autoconnect retries left is tracked for each device and connection. Previously it was tracked only per connection and this lead to unexpected behaviors in case of multiconnect profiles.

nmcli throws a warning when NetworkManager version mismatches.

A new link setting that holds properties related to the kernel link such as tx-queue-length, gso-max-size, gso-max-segments and gro-max-size has been introduced.

Plus a lot of bugfixes and translation updates. See NEWS file for even more detailed summary of what’s new.

Acknowledgements

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

Thomas Haller, Alexander Lochmann, Beniamino Galvani, Fernando Fernandez Mancera, Yuri Chornoivan, Lubomir Rintel, Michael Biebl, Wen Liang, Dylan Van Assche, Yaakov Selkowitz, Stewart Smith, Heiko Thiery, Julia Dronova, Ratchanan Srirattanamet, Sven Schwermer, Fabrice Fontaine, NorwayFun, Etienne Champetier, Corentin Noël, Vladislav Tsisyk, liaohanqin, Jordi Mas, Daniel Kolesa, Haochen Tong, Joao Machado, Alfonso Sánchez-Beato, AsciiWolf, Peter Hutterer, Aleksandr Melman, Eivind Næss, Marc Muehlfeld, Tom Sobczynski, Sabri Unal, David Woodhouse, Benjamin Berg, Sabri Ünal, Frederic Martinsons, Petr Menšík, Gris Ge, Javier Sánchez Parra, Miroslav Suchy, qyecst, chengyechun, Jan Vaclav, Íñigo Huguet

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!