A little bit more than half a year and 481 commits since NetworkManager 1.44, a new release is ready: NetworkManager 1.46.

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

Drop build with python2, python3 is now required

Building with python2 is not possible anymore. In order to build NetworkManager, python3 is now a requirement. Considering python2 is EOL since January 1, 2020, we considered it was time to drop it aswell.

Support randomizing the MAC address based on the Wi-Fi network

NetworkManager is introducing wifi.cloned-mac-address=stable-ssid to allow randomizing the MAC address based on the Wi-Fi network’s SSID. The goal behind this change is to improve user privacy as there are some network operators and advertisers tracking MAC addresses to collect user information about their movements and device usage patterns

The change was also accepted in Fedora Linux 40 as the default behavior.

IPv4 DAD (Duplicate Address Detection) enabled by default

A duplicate address is a serious issues which leads to non-working setups or problems hard to debug. We decided to enable DAD by default to detect such problems.

For more details see also the accepted change in Fedora Linux 40.

What else?

Now the NetworkManager VPN plugins have support for two-factor authentication (2FA).

SR-IOV support to configure the NIC’s eswitch settings via Devlink using the properties sriov.eswitch-mode, sriov.eswitch-inline-mode and sriov.eswitch-encap-mode.

It is now possible to create interface types not directly supported by NetworkManager by defining a generic connection with the generic.device-handler property set. The property specifies the name of a dispatcher script to be called to create and destroy the interface. NetworkManager will then take care of the IP configuration on that interface.

Plus a lot of bugfixes, new features 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.

Aleksandr Melman, Beniamino Galvani, Emmanuel Grumbach, Fernando Fernandez Mancera, Frederic Martinsons, Gris Ge, Íñigo Huguet, Jan Vaclav, Javier Sánchez Parra, Johannes Zink, Korbin Bickel, Luna Jernberg, Michael Biebl, Mohammed Sadiq, Sergey Koshelenko, Sicelo A. Mhlongo, Stanislas Faye, Tatsuyuki Ishi, Thomas Haller, Wen Liang, Yuki Inoguchi, Yuri Chornoivan.

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!