14 DAY TRIAL // After informing the Linux world about the most important feature that would land in the upcoming NetworkManager 1.2 network connection manager software, today Lubomir Rintel has released the first development build, NetworkManager 1.1.90.
NetworkManager 1.2 will be the newest stable and most advanced release of the popular software, which is currently used in hundreds of Linux kernel-based operating systems. It promises features like random MAC addresses for Wi-Fi access point scanning, support for wpa_supplicant's AP list during Wi-Fi scannings, support for Wi-Fi powersave, as well as support for creating more types of software devices.
The software devices can now be stacked arbitrarily, the new address-based host tracking protection functionality relies on the RFC7217 stable privacy addressing, and the route management feature has been greatly improved. Moreover, the interoperability with other network management software has been enhanced as well, and the network connectivity in namespace-based containers like Docker and LXC is correctly handled.
LLDP listener functionality, Ethernet Wake-On-Lan config, and much more
Among other interesting features that will be implemented in the upcoming NetworkManager 1.2 release, we can mention support for configuring the Ethernet Wake-On-Lan feature, a new LLDP listener functionality, Device instances are supported for all software connections, VPN secrets support has been added to the command-line secret agent, and the CLI client now offers colored output.
But there are numerous other new features in NetworkManager 1.2, such as fewer dependencies, support for managing the hostname via systemd-hostnamed on systemd-based distributions, multicast_snooping support, new DHCP_FQDN key in ifcfg files, support for DNS options in the resolv.conf file, as well as support for event and native logging.
Of course, if you want to help test this first development release, you can download NetworkManager 1.1.90 right now from our website, but please try to remember at all times that it is a pre-release build and that you should not install it on your production system. More details about the upcoming features of NetworkManager 1.2 can be found in the changelog below.