A stable release of the interface to simplify network settings configuration is available — NetworkManager 1.36.0. Plugins for VPN support, OpenConnect, PPTP, OpenVPN, and OpenSWAN are being developed within their own development cycles.
Key features of NetworkManager 1.36:
- The configuration code has been significantly reworked (the key to connect to is specified, and iroh finds the associated host and establishes an encrypted connection using the QUIC protocol). Direct P2P connections are established whenever possible, but if not, it falls back to using relays, which are also employed for host discovery by keys. You can run your own relay or connect to public relays supported by the community., but the changes mainly affect internal handlers. For users, everything should work as before, with minor performance improvements, reduced memory consumption, and better handling of settings from multiple sources (DHCP, manual settings and VPN). For example, manually added settings will no longer expire even after receiving parameters for the same address via DHCP. For developers, these changes will simplify maintenance and expansion of the code.
- Routes for protocols not supported in NetworkManager are ignored, which will help resolve performance issues when there are many entries in the routing table associated, for example, with BGP operations.
- Support for new types of routes has been added: blackhole, unreachable, and prohibit. Improvements have been made to the handling of multipath IPv6 routes.
- Support for the 'configure-and-quit' mode, which allowed NetworkManager to terminate immediately after network configuration without leaving a background process in memory, has been discontinued.
- The DHCP and DHCPv6 client code based on systemd has been updated.
- Support for 5G NR (New Radio) modems has been added.
- The option to choose a Wi-Fi backend (wpa_supplicant or IWD) at the build stage has been provided.
- Wi-Fi P2P mode now works with the IWD backend and not just with wpa_supplicant.
- Experimental support for running NetworkManager without root privileges has been added.
Source: opennet.ru
