NetworkManager 1.44: New Features and Improvements

Rohan Timalsina

August 24, 2023 - TuxCare expert team

A software tool called NetworkManager aims to make using computer networks simpler for Linux kernel-based and other Unix-like operating systems. Almost after half a year, NetworkManager 1.44 has arrived with new updates and bug fixes, which we will discuss in this blog post.

NetworkManager 1.44: What’s New?

ifcfg-rh plugin deprecated

The ifcfg-rh plugin is now deprecated in NetworkManager and will receive no new features except bug fixes. A warning is emitted to the log when a connection in ifcfg-rh format is found.

Wi-Fi and WWAN radio disabled in nmtui

nmtui is a screen-oriented configuration tool for users who do not prefer command-line tools. From this version, users can disable Wi-Fi and WWAN radio using the nmtui client.

New Link Option

A new link setting now stores information on the kernel link, including the tx-queue-length, gso-max-size, gso-max-segments, and gro-max-size.

More Changes

Furthermore, this release brings an updated NetworkManager daemon to get the D-Bus name only after filling the D-Bus tree. This change might delay the startup time, but it is required to prevent race conditions in other services.

Each device and connection’s remaining autoconnect retries are now kept track of. Before this, it was tracked per connection, which caused unexpected behavior when using multiconnect profiles.

Also, NetworkManager now tracks the number of auto-connect retries left for each device and connection rather than just per connection, which could result in unexpected behaviors for multiconnect profiles. Additionally, tentative IPv6 addresses are no longer used to resolve the system’s hostname via DNS.

Some other changes include:

When there is a version conflict with NetworkManager, nmcli issues a warning.
Uses netlink instead of sysfs to set VLAN filtering options on bridges
Support for IMDSv2 on Amazon EC2 in nm-cloud-setup
New [keyfile].rename option enables users to force rename profiles on disk
Translation updates and a lot of bug fixes

Conclusion

The source tarball file of NetworkManager 1.44 is readily available to download from this link. You will then have to compile the source file to get the latest version. Alternatively, you can wait for it to be available in the stable software repositories of your Linux distribution to update the package.

The sources for this article include a story from 9to5Linux.

Summary