NetworkManager 1.36 Released with Improved WPA3 Security, 5G NR Modem Support

NetworkManager 1.34

NetworkManager 1.36 was released today as the latest stable series of this popular network connection manager software for Linux-based operating systems.

Coming a little over a month after NetworkManager 1.34, the NetworkManager 1.36 release is here with new features and numerous improvements, starting with improved support for WPA3 Wi-Fi network security by enabling a new H2E (hash to element) method for generating the SAE (Simultaneous Authentication of Equals) password element.

New features include support for 5G NR (New Radio) modems, support for the IWD (iNet wireless daemon) backend for Wi-Fi P2P in addition to wpa_supplicant. Users will be able to select the default Wi-Fi backend, wpa_supplicant or IWD, during build time.

Also new in NetworkManager 1.36 is support for special route types, including blackhole, prohibit, and “unreachable, the ability to turn off MAC ageing on Bridge connections, support for manually configured IP addresses to no longer expire even if they’re also obtained dynamically, as well as the experimental support for starting NetworkManager without root user privileges.

Among other noteworthy changes, this release dramatically improves the handling and performance of Layer 3 configurations, makes the handling of IP addressing and routing information more efficient and less resource-hungry on systems with a large amount of IP configuration information, and gracefully handles replies from broken DHCP servers that send duplicate address or mask options.

Furthermore, NetworkManager now ignores routes managed by routing daemons in an attempt to address a performance issue on specialized routers, honors rd.znet_ifnames kernel command-line option on network bootups on IBM s390 systems, and exposes NTP servers obtained via DHCPv6 on the DBus API.

Last but not least, NetworkManager 1.36 removes the “configure-and-quit” mode and nm-iface-helper, updates the code for systemd-based DHCP and DHCPv6 clients from upstream, and fixes several bugs from previous releases that could cause NetworkManager to crash in rare conditions.

Linux OS maintainers and advanced users who want to compile NetworkManager themselves can download NetworkManager 1.36 right now from here. Everyone else should wait patiently for the new release to arrive in the stable software repositories of their favorite GNU/Linux distributions.

Last updated 2 years ago

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