NetworkManager 1.16 Approaches With WireGuard VPN Tunnels, WiFi Direct Connections

The release of NetworkManager 1.16 is right around the corner with this morning's first release candidate.

The NetworkManager 1.16 cycle is wrapping up with the code now having been branched and the RC1 release issued. Some of the highlights for the NetworkManager 1.16 release include:

- Support for SAE authentication (Simultaneous Authentication of Equals) for 802.11s meshing and WPA3-Personal.

- Support for establishing WiFi Direct connections / WiFi P2P.

- Support for WireGuard VPN tunnels within NetworkManager. This also allows creating of WireGuard profiles from the nmcli command-line interface.

- AP and ad-hoc support was added to the IWD WiFi back-end.

- Improved handling of DHCP router options with the internal DHCP plug-in.

- NetworkManager is no longer installed as a D-Bus activatable service.

- A new PolicyKit permission to control WiFi scanning.

There's also various fixes and other lower-level Linux networking improvements. More details and downloads via Git.