dhcpcd-7 finally enters beta

Published: Friday, March 31, 2017
Tags: code

It’s been a while in the making, but dhcpcd-7.0.0-beta1 is finally here! I have been using this a lot on all supported platforms bar Solaris and it’s been very trouble free, so hopefully not many changes (if any? famous last words!) before a RC and final release.

Summary of changes since dhcpcd-6.11.5:

source file locations reworked: dhcpcd source is in src dhcpcd hooks are in hooks compat is in compat
README split into README.md and BUILDING.md
internal routing is now protocol agnostic
avoid using __packed and use compile time asserts instead
addresses some alignment issues
disable some ARP code on kernels which support RFC5227
BSD IPv6 kernel settings are now updated to reflect dhcpcd config
custom logger has been removed, syslog handles everything as such, the --logfile option has been removed as well. If you need better/earlier logging, get a better syslogger!
distinfo and signed distinfo files are now available alongside release taraballs from this point onwards
default DBDIR has changed from /var/db to /var/db/dhcpcd
/etc/dhcpcd.duid moves to DBDIR/duid
/etc/dhcpcd.secret moves to DBDIR/secret
lease file names have dhcpcd removed from them as they are now inside a directory of the same name
fixed issues with reject routes not working on some platforms
improved nl80211 support on Linux for working out the SSID
no longer request NTP by default in dhcpcd.conf
fix detecting IPv6 DAD on OpenBSD
remove custom Solaris DLPI filtering in favour of BPF (note there seems to be a kernel issue where the DHCP fd receives ARP’s as well, the only side effect is a noisy syslog)
BPF filtering vastly improved so dhcpcd only wake up on ARP or DHCP packets destined for it
support for MUD URL (draft-ietf-opsawg-mud-05)
if the kernel isn’t doing DAD, don’t insist on waiting for it to actually do it
fix a potential crash where the DHCP or ARP states could be freed before the packet processing loop naturally breaks
removed gateway and nogateway options (these can be controlled by the nooption directive which works for more than just gateways)
removed ipv6ra_own and ipv6ra_own_default options (these can be controled by the ipv6rs/noipv6rs directive)
fix a memory leak on systems where posix_spawnattr_init allocates memory by calling posix_spawnattr_destroy afterwards
fix a crash receiving SIGUSR1

I’ve not done everything I’ve wanted to, but I feel that many issues have now been addressed and on the whole dhcpcd is in a very good state right now.

Let me know of any issues you find!