The long overdue 1.1.8 release candidate is available for download from http://dev.packages.vyos.net/iso/testing/vyos-1.1.8-rc1-amd64.iso
While a number of people have already been running 1.2.0 nightly builds in production, we do acknowledge there are people who are not in position to install updates that are not completely stable, and recently discovered vulnerabilities in dnsmasq that potentially allow remote code execution are impossible to ignore (unlike many older vulnerabilities that are only locally or aren't practical to exploint).
It's stable for all practical purposes, but since it includes pretty big updates and a few new features, I suppose it's better to go through the release candidate phase. If in say a week no one finds any issues.
The release is only available for 64-bit machines at the moment. We can provide it for 32-bit, but we are wondering if anyone still wants it, when even small boards have 64-bit CPUs.
You can read the full changelog here: https://wiki.vyos.net/wiki/1.1.8_changelog_proposal
Among package updates, there are openssl 1.0.2l and dnsmasq 2.72. Since squeeze is long EOL, the OpenSSL update required re-compiling everything that depends on OpenSSL ourselves, which took longer than we hoped.
Among VyOS fixes and features, there are user/password authentication for OpenVPN, as-override option for BGP neighbors, as-path-exclude option for route-map rules, tweakable pipe (buffer) size for netflow/sflow (too small hardcoded value could cause pmacct crash on high traffic routers), peer-to-peer VXLAN interfaces, and multiple fixes for bugs of varying severity, such as overly high CPU load on KVM guests or protocol negation in NAT rules not working.
A lot of features from 1.2.0 are not backportable due to big code changes and dependencies on way newer software versions than 1.1.x could provide, so features for cherry-picking had to be carefully chosen and even that needed quite a bit of merge conflict resolution. Quite a few of those were meant for the ill-fated "lithium" release that was supposed to be named 1.2.0 and be the last squeeze-based release, but then squeeze EOL'd, then serious life circumstances forced Alex Harpin to put all his VyOS work on hold thus leaving the maintainers team even more understaffed, and then the company we started to fund VyOS development through commercial support and services had a hard time when it almost reached the point of bankruptcy and dissolution (and, since it's self-funded, its founders almost reached the point of personal bankruptcy along with it), so by the time we could get things back on track a feature release based on squeeze wouldn't be feasible, especially considering how much we had to change to make the old codebase run on jessie. In a sense, it's a lithium that could have been, at least partially, rather than a straight maintenance release with nothing but bugfixes.
But, many of those features spent so much time in the limbo without making it into a release called stable that we felt compelled to include at least some of them.
I would like to say thanks to everyone who contributed and made this release possible, namely: Kim Hagen, Alex Harpin, Yuya Kusakabe, Yuriy Andamasov, Ray Soucy, Nikolay Krasnoyarski, Jason Hendry, Kevin Blackham, kouak, upa, Logan Attwood, Panagiotis Moustafellos, Thomas Courbon, and Ildar Ibragimov (hope I didn't forget anyone).