VyOS 1.2.7 release

Hello!

VyOS 1.2.7 LTS release is now available to subscribers, and everyone can build an equivalent image from our repositories. This release took a while to complete, but it isn't a small maintenance release either: it includes multiple bug fixes (41 resolved issues in total) and some feature backports from the upcoming 1.3/equuleus branch. The highlights include a kernel mode L2TP implementation that makes L2TP 2x faster, a command to export a part of the configuration to JSON, Linux kernel updated to 4.19.176 and more. This is also the first release that officially supports container guest mode.

Cloud marketplace images will take some more time to get published, but you can update your cloud installations using the generic ISO image meanwhile.

Configuration export to JSON

This feature has been in the rolling release for a while already, but now it's also in the 1.2.x LTS branch. There's a new pipe in the configuration mode CLI: |json. You can use it to export any chunk of configuration to JSON. For example:

# show system name-server 
 name-server 8.8.8.8
 name-server 8.8.4.4

# show system name-server |  json
{
    "name-server": [
        "8.8.8.8",
        "8.8.4.4"
    ]
}

You can also convert a config file to JSON: vyos-config-to-json /config/config.boot

This opens up a lot of scripting opportunities. You can work with  VyOS configuration data from any language, or use existing tools like jq.

There's also a corresponding HTTP API method as well, just like in the upcoming 1.3, so that people can use the same external management tools for old and new VyOS versions.

Kernel-mode L2TP/IPsec

VyOS 1.2.x still uses xl2tpd for client L2TP connections. The upcoming 1.3 release will use accel-ppp, which offers excellent performance and many useful features, but that change would be too big and risky for an LTS release.

Still, xl2tpd supports kernel mode L2TP implementation now, so we upgraded it in 1.2.7 and enabled that module. Now client  L2TP is two times faster than it used to be.

Future plans

This is probably the last feature release in the 1.2.x line. The focus in the 1.3 release is on rewriting the old code to free it from the old design mistakes and limitations, and most of that work is not backportable, so future work on 1.2.x will be limited to bug fixes and security updates.

We aren't planning to phase out 1.2.x support any time soon: it will be supported at least until the end of 2022, with a possibility of extended support for critical issues after that.

Changelog