Canonical Announces Netplan 1.0 with Simultaneous WPA2 and WPA3 Support

This release will be available by default in the upcoming Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and Debian GNU/Linux 13 operating system releases.
Marius Nestorby Marius Nestor0
Netplan 1.0

After more than seven years of development, Canonical’s Netplan utility for easily configuring networking on a Linux system has finally matured with version 1.0, a major release introducing exciting new features.

Highlights of Netplan 1.0 include support for using WPA2 and WPA3 security protocols simultaneously, support for using PSK and EAP passwords simultaneously, Mellanox VF-LAG support for high-performance SR-IOV networking, as well as new hairpin and port-mac-learning settings for VXLAN tunnels with FRRouting.

Netplan 1.0 also introduces a new netplan status –diff subcommand for finding differences between configuration and system state, support for identifying bridge/bond/vrf members, support for the WPA3-Enterprise security protocol, and support for LEAP and EAP-PWD auth methods.

Netplan now comes with a stable libnetplan1 API that no longer contains legacy code, which increases the maintainability of Netplan’s codebase going forward. Additional bridge port settings have been added as well in this release, along with much-improved documentation and numerous bug fixes.

“Those changes pave the way to integrate Netplan into 3rd party projects, such as system installers or cloud deployment methods. By shipping the new python3-netplan Python bindings to libnetplan, it is now easier than ever to access Netplan functionality and network validation from other projects,” said Lukas Märdian, maintainer and lead developer of Netplan, in a blog post.

But Netplan 1.0 includes even more goodies compared to the version used in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish), such as support for managing new network interface types like veth, dummy, VXLAN, VRF, or InfiniBand (IPoIB), and integration with NetworkManager on desktop systems.

It also brought improved consistency between supported backend renderers like systemd-networkd and NetworkManager by matching physical network interfaces on permanent MAC addresses when using the match.macaddress setting, as well as new hardware offloading functionality for high-performance networking.

While Netplan 1.0 was released on February 29th, Canonical says that it will be available by default in the upcoming Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat) operating system series, due out on April 25th, 2024.

Canonical also says that Netplan 1.0 will be available in the forthcoming Debian GNU/Linux 13 “Trixie” operating system series, which should see the light of day in June or July 2024. For more details about the changes included in Netplan 1.0, check out the GitHub release notes.

Last updated 3 weeks ago

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