Canonical’s Netplan utility, which has been under development for over seven years, is now mature with the release of version 1.0. This significant release comes with a host of new features.
Key highlights in Netplan 1.0 include the concurrent support of WPA2 and WPA3 security protocols, the ability to use PSK and EAP passwords at the same time, Mellanox VF-LAG support for superior SR-IOV networking, and new hairpin and port-mac-learning settings for VXLAN tunnels partnered with FRRouting.
The recent launch also incorporates a new subcommand, netplan status – diff, that helps identify the differences between the configuration and system state. It also includes support for identifying members of bridge/bond/vrf, support for WPA3-Enterprise security protocol, and LEAP and EAP-PWD authentication methods.
This version comes with a stable libnetplan1 API devoid of legacy code, which improves Netplan’s codebase maintainability in the future. Extra bridge port settings have been included in this release, as well as significantly better documentation and numerous fixes for previous bugs.
“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.
Netplan 1.0 was released on February 29th, and Canonical has stated that it will be integrated by default in the up and coming Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat) operating system series, expected to be released on April 25th, 2024.
According to Canonical, Netplan 1.0 will also be available in the upcoming Debian GNU/Linux 13 “Trixie” operating system series. The release of this series is anticipated for June or July 2024. For a more comprehensive understanding of the changes incorporated in Netplan 1.0, refer to the GitHub release notes.
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