Rancher Desktop 1.8.0

[jandubois]

This is the 1.8.0 release of Rancher Desktop, an open source desktop application to bring Kubernetes and container management to Mac, Windows, and Linux.

New Features

Configurable application behavior, e.g. auto-start at login

Some aspects of application behavior can now be configured via the Application | Behavior preferences:

• Automatically start at login
• Start in the background
• Quit when closing the application window
• Hide notification icon

All application settings can be changed via rdctl

Both rdctl start and rdctl set can be used to pass values for any configuration setting except

• diagnostics.showMuted
• WSL.integration

Use rdctl set --help to get list of settings supported on the current platform.

Deployment profile (experimental)

Deployment profiles can be used both by the user and by administrators to provide initial preference settings on first-run (or after a factory-reset), and to lock down settings, so they cannot be changed via the GUI or CLI.

New networking stack on Windows (experimental)

An experimental network stack on Windows should provide better compatibility with various VPN configurations. It also uses its own network namespace, providing better isolation from other WSL2 distros on the same machine. It is still a work-in-progress (port forwarding has to be performed manually) and has some limitations (WSL integration is not yet implemented). Please read the documentation section in the Epic to see how to enable and use it. Please provide feedback if you run into any problems beyond the documented limitations.

Support for Apple Virtualization framework on macOS (experimental)

On macOS it is now possible to use experimental support for the Virtualization framework instead of QEMU for running the virtual machine. Unlike QEMU it supports more than 8 CPUs on aarch64 machines. There are several known performance and stability issues, so this is for evaluation purposes only. Virtual machine type can be switched with from QEMU to VZ with

rdctl set --virtual-machine.type vz

Important Bug fixes and enhancements

Kubernetes 1.26 and Moby

Kubernetes 1.26 now works again with both container engines.

Additional mount points on macOS

On macOS, the directories /Volumes and /var/folders are automatically mounted into the VM, so any directories under them can be bound into containers. This includes the $TMPDIR directory.

Kubernetes ingress binding to 0.0.0.0 on Windows

On Windows, the Kubernetes loadbalancer services are now bound to all interfaces, so they can be accessed from other machines on the local network (just like on macOS). The old behavior (binding only to 127.0.0.1) can be restored with

rdctl set --kubernetes.ingress.localhost-only true

This cannot yet be configured via the GUI.

socket_vmnet has been updated on macOS (experimental)

socket_vmnet is going to be the replacement for the current vde_vmnet driver that is responsible for creating routable IP addresses (requires running with "administrative access"). There have been several bug fixes to socket_vmnet. Select it with:

rdctl set --experimental.virtual-machine.socket-fmnet=true

File sharing via 9p on macOS (experimental)

On macOS, the alternate filesystem protocol 9p can now be selected via rdctl instead of creating a Lima override.yaml file

rdctl set--experimental.virtual-machine.mount.type 9p

9p mount options can also be configured; they will apply to all mounted volumes:

--experimental.virtual-machine.mount.9p.cache-mode string         (Allowed values: [none, loose, fscache, mmap])
--experimental.virtual-machine.mount.9p.msize-in-kb int           maximum packet size
--experimental.virtual-machine.mount.9p.protocol-version string   (Allowed values: [9p2000, 9p2000.u, 9p2000.L])
--experimental.virtual-machine.mount.9p.security-model string     (Allowed values: [passthrough, mapped-xattr, mapped-file, none])

Known issues

Experimental features can only be configured via rdctl

They are not exposed via the Preferences dialog yet.

Allowed Images

When the Allowed Images list is enabled, all images from *.pkg.dev (the Google CDN) are implicitly allowed to enable pulling from Google Cloud registries.

The format used to specify image patterns is still subject to change.

Long time to shut down Rancher Desktop when using the Virtualization framework

Due to a bug in the bindings there is a "panic" in the shutdown of the VM (also visible in the logs), which will take an additional 3 minutes to time out.

Experimental Features

The following features are considered "experimental" and may change in incompatible ways (or be removed) without advance notice:

rdctl commandline syntax

If changes are made, the old syntax will continue to be supported if possible, but this cannot be guaranteed.

The output of rdctl command may also change in the future. E.g. rdctl list-settings currently just dumps out the settings object in JSON format, but could provide a better organized / readable format in the future.

API

The Rancher Desktop backend provides an API that is used both by the GUI frontend and by rdctl, and can also be used directly via rdctl api. The API is versioned, but the version might change without prior notice, and backward compatibility should not be expected.

Allowed Images

The allowed image list is still considered experimental, mostly because the pattern format is still going to change from extended regular expressions (intentionally under-documented) to simple wildcard matches.

New networking stack

The new networking stack implementation is still ongoing. It is not yet a full implementation on Windows, and not yet available on Linux and macOS at all.

Filesharing via 9p on macOS

socket_vmnet networking driver on macOS

Virtualization framework on macOS

This configuration is still considered experimental in the Lima project, which Rancher Desktop uses on macOS to implement the virtual machine. There are various known performance and stability problems that have to be resolved upstream.

Deprecated Features

This section provides a warning about features that will become unsupported in the future.

Catalina

Support for macOS Catalina will be removed in Rancher Desktop 1.10.

Kubernetes 1.24.1 to 1.24.3 with Moby engine

Kubernetes 1.24.1 to 1.24.3 will no longer work with the moby engine in Rancher Desktop 1.10. They will continue to work with containerd. Kubernetes 1.24.4 and later will continue to be supported with moby.

Removed Features

No features have been removed in this release

Updates to bundled utilities

• docker 20.10.21 → 23.0.1
• docker-buildx 0.9.1 → 0.10.4
• docker-compose 2.14.0 → 2.16.0
• helm 3.10.2 → 3.11.2
• nerdctl 1.0.0. → 1.2.1
• trivy 0.35.0 → 0.38.3

Known Issues

Connect with the developers

• The issue queue

• Rancher Users Slack in the #rancher-desktop channel

Changelog

The full version changelog, from v1.7.0, can be found using GitHub compare and the details of the release can be found in the v1.8.0 milestone.

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This discussion was created from the release Rancher Desktop 1.8.0.