WireGuard Issues New Snapshot, But Doesn't Look Like It Will Make It Into Linux 4.21

WireGuard 0.0.20181218 is now available as another test release of this secure network VPN tunnel, but sadly it doesn't look like it will be landing in the upcoming Linux 4.21 cycle.

There has been incredible interest in WireGuard this year with even Linus Torvalds looking forward to it being merged, but sadly it's not been queued up as of writing in net-next -- nor has there been any pull request or new round of patch review for WireGuard on the kernel mailing list in recent weeks.

After not making it into 4.20, there was hope it would land in 4.21 to achieve its goal of being mainlined in 2018, but due to no activity yet with the Linux 4.21 merge window expected to open Sunday night, the outlook appears bleak for this next cycle. There have been some criticism raised to the Zinc crypto API relied upon by WireGuard, but it looks like Jason Donenfeld and the other developers involved are just trying to get everything ironed out before going for another mainline call.

As for the WireGuard 0.0.20181218, it is still labeled as a snapshot that should be considered experimental. This new snapshot has some crypto fixes/improvements, build fixes around Clang, a small optimization, and other work. The latest code can also be fetched always from WireGuard Git.