There has been a lot of discussion on this list over the last few months.
The community is definitely growing and we're happy to see people helping
people use the software.
With more use comes more feature requests and bug reports. This is generally
a good thing, but it can be frustrating. A few mailing-list interactions
over the past few weeks have ended with a "That's fixed in the next release"
or "That feature is coming in Glendale" message. That answer inevitably
leads to a "What's Glendale and when will it be here?" question.
Vyatta's next release is code named "Glendale" (after a city in California,
which is where we currently get all our release names). Glendale is the code
base that will eventually become VC4.
In the history of Vyatta, there have been three large epochs:
The first epoch was the 1.0 through 1.0.3 releases. In this epoch, the
system was a custom version of Linux. It was very inflexible and adding a
package to the system meant rebuilding the whole system from scratch. While
the Debian package format was used as a format, all packages in the system
were incompatible with standard Debian package dependencies.
The second epoch started with 1.1. In release 1.1, we reworked the system
completely to base it on standard Debian and to be compatible with Debian
package dependencies. This meant it was now possible to get a package from a
standard Debian repository and add it to the system and apt would know how
to do all the right things with installing dependent packages. With the
start of VC2, we broke the release trains into separate Community and
Supported systems, based on each other, but not necessarily the same. On the
Community side of things, VC2 through VC3 are part of the second epoch. On
the subscription side of things, releases from 2.0 through 2.3 are part of
the second epoch.
Glendale represents the start of the third epoch. The goals for Glendale
were to:
1. Make the system even more open and extensible.
2. Improve the scalability and performance of the system to address new
markets.
3. Add in a bunch of features that everybody wanted, some of which had
been blocked by fundamental architectural issues that needed to be removed.
4. Fix a whole lot of bugs.
We believe we are well on our way to achieving all that. While I won't go
into a lot of detail right here, you can expect the following major changes
in Glendale:
1. The routing subsystem has been overhauled. The feature set has
improved dramatically and the stability and performance have increased.
2. The CLI has been completely overhauled. On the surface, you'll find
that it looks the same and has the same flavor of past releases, but the
functionality is greatly increased along with the ease of adding new
features going forward.
3. We have added a bunch of new features. Many of these were
top-requested features on the Top Enhancements Community wiki page. A
high-level enhancements include:
* DHCP client
* QoS
* VPN remote client support
* PPPoE
* GRE encapsulation
* Equal Cost Multipath (ECMP) routing
* WAN Load Balancing
* A new installer to replace the install-system script
There are other enhancements at all levels of the system below the major
feature level.
The next step is for you, the Vyatta community, to get involved in the
development and testing process. We're interested in your feedback,
opinions, and comments.
In order to get you convenient access to the system, we're going to make
three pre-release builds available in ISO CD-ROM format on the following
schedule:
* Alpha 1: January 2008
* Alpha 2: February 2008
* Beta: March 2008
* Release: April 2008
We are preparing Alpha 1 even as we speak and I should be able to announce
its arrival later this week or early next week. At that time, I'll give you
a lot more detail about what has changed in the release, what to expect in
terms of rough edges and incomplete functionality. Not everything will be in
the system in the early alphas, and many things that are present will have
major issues. Each release will try to identify the landmines to help you
avoid them.
We're all looking forward to this release. Glendale represents a quantum
leap forward in the Vyatta system and is the foundation for many
improvements we have on the drawing board. If you're at all interested in
the Vyatta system, you'll want to download the Alphas and start
investigating the changes.
As I said, I'll have more detail in a few days. Until then...
Cheers,
-- Dave Roberts
Vyatta Cruise Director
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