VyOS Project May/June 2021 Update

Hello everyone,

it's time for the progress update for the months of May and June.

We've been a bit too busy with working on the code that we forgot to post a progress update in June—time to fix it! In short: the 1.3 release is on track to become the new LTS in the late summer or early autumn, 1.2.x maintenance continues, and the 1.4 release is gaining new cool features that we can later backport to 1.3.

As usual, we're going to look at the monthly progress in 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4 separately. If you have any questions about the release schedule of these three major versions, you should go check out the previous post on this subject.

VyOS 1.3 Equuleus

1.3.0, the first stable version of Equuleus, is planned to be released before Autumn 2021, although there will be more release candidates before that. In the meantime, you can try the 1.3-beta nightly releases if you'd like to see how it's coming along.
Until then, the 1.3.0-rc5 snapshot release option is available as usual, should you prefer a more stable release.

Now, let's talk about what's new in Equuleus since April, besides regular bugfixes. Everything up to the fifth release candidate was covered in the 1.2.8 and 1.3.0-rc5 release changelog blogpost. Let's see what's new since RC5 came out:

• inotify based watchers for VRRP and IPSec.
• DHCPv6 server can be configured to set clients' IPv6 static address prefixes.
• Support for PPP interface caching.

VyOS 1.4 Sagitta

Meanwhile, development in the trunk continues. The legacy, separate codebases are being rewritten and consolidated into the vyos-1x package. In addition to bugfixes and all the new features mentioned under 1.3 above, a new IPSec VPN implementation with VTI and DMVPN support was written in the modern Python/XML style. Likewise, the interfaces for VTI, sysctl, conntrack-sync and NHRP were all rewritten in the same style.

What else is new?

• strongSwan was updated to 5.9.1.
• OpenNHRP was updated to the latest upstream version (0.14.1).
• VTI support for VRF was implemented.
• add system image switched from curl to a more flexible internal script.
• mDNS repeater for VRRP.
• NAT translation options for persistent and randomised address/port mappings.

VyOS 1.2 Crux

VyOS 1.2.8 LTS was released recently. Check out the changelog blogpost for details. As mentioned in an earlier post, new versions of software will be backported to Debian Jessie to help maintain Crux.

We are already working on the future 1.2.9 release that will include an OpenSSH version update and multiple bug fixes.

That's it for now. See you next month for this month's updates!