Reach the Top With NetworkManager 1.0.2

Summit - Asbjørn Floden (CC BY-NC 2.0)
Summit – Asbjørn Floden (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Just this morning Lubomir released NetworkManager 1.0.2, the latest of the 1.0 stable series.  It’s  a great cleanup and bugfix release with contributions from lots of community members in many different areas of the project!

Some highlights of new functionality and fixes:

  • Wi-Fi device band capability indications, requested by the GNOME Shell team
  • Devices set to ignore carrier that use DHCP configurations will now wait a period of time for the carrier to appear, instead of failing immediately
  • Startup optimizations allow networking-dependent services to be started much earlier by systemd
  • Memory usage reductions through many memory leak fixes and optimizations
  • teamd interface management is now more robust and teamd is respawned when it terminates
  • dnsmasq is now respawned when it terminates in the local caching nameserver configuration
  • Fixes for an IPv6 DoS issue CVE-2015-2924, similar to one fixed recently in the kernel
  • IPv6 Dynamic DNS updates sent through DHCP now work more reliably (and require a fully qualified name, per the RFCs)
  • An IPv6 router solicitation loop due to a non-responsive IPv6 router has been fixed

While the list of generally interesting enhancements may be short, it masks 373 git commits and over 50 bugzilla issues fixed.  It’s a great release and we recommend that everyone upgrade.

Next up is NetworkManager 1.2, with DNS improvements, Wi-Fi scanning and AP list fixes for mobile uses, NM-in-containers improvements (no udev required!), even less dependence on the obsolete dbus-glib, less logging noise, device management fixes, continuing removal of external dependencies (like avahi-autoipd), configuration reload-ability, and much more!