10.0 (June 30, 2025)

This is a major release with many improvements.

New features and improvements:

  • Support for Raspberry Pi 5 boards.
  • New VPN features for automatically turning Raspberry Pi 5 boards into distant WALT nodes.
  • New swap-on-network feature for more flexible RAM usage on nodes.
  • New subcommand walt node save, to save changes made on a node as a new OS image.
  • New web API at http://<server>/api.
  • Support for more advanced virtual environments in walt image shell.
  • Automatic network position reports for nodes connected to a LLDP-capable switch (no need to run walt device rescan after moving them).
  • New option --all for walt image show, for listing all OS images of the server.
  • New --subdir option for walt image build, for building several images of a single repository URL.
  • Image layer caching enabled for walt image build.
  • Using walt image build, more flexible image naming in FROM lines of the Dockerfile.
  • Auto-upgrade of client code when server code version changes.
  • Better handling of partial rescans (e.g, walt device rescan <single-switch>).
  • Per-user content for [node]:/persist.
  • Node time zone now set to server time zone whenever possible.
  • JFrog Container Registry support (a private alternative to the Docker Hub).
  • Support for letting the server access internet through an HTTP/HTTPS proxy.
  • Robustness or performance improved on various topics.
  • Various developer-oriented improvements.
  • Documentation updates, test suite updates and other minor improvements.

Fixes:

  • Fix changing netsetup (i.e. NAT vs LAN) on virtual nodes not applied before a restart of server software.
  • Fix 0-padding issue with Raspberry Pi vendor prefix e4:5f:01.
  • Fix init scripts for booting OpenWRT OS images.
  • Fix web docs search function no longer working.
  • Fix rare concurrency issues.
  • Fix issue when log line sender disconnects unexpectedly.
  • Fix a date parsing issue for podman image inspect.
  • A few fixes regarding the g5k module.
  • Security-related changes proposed by dependabot.
  • More minor fixes.

9.0 (August 29, 2024)

This is a major release with many improvements since WALT version 8.2.

New features and improvements:

  • Automatic hard-reboot of nodes failing to boot before a configurable delay.
  • rpi3b+, and some rpi4b: SD-card no longer needed, even on 1st boot.
  • Smart Zsh completion support. Note: a similar feature for Bash exists since WALT 8.0.
  • WALT documentation now available at http://<your-walt-server>/doc too.
  • New DNS service on the server for easier interaction between nodes or other devices.
  • New hybrid boot modes for specific experiments where network boot is not applicable.
  • New subcommand walt device port-config, for easier platform maintenance in a large building.
  • New subcommand walt advanced update-default-images. Check-out node-ownership documentation topic for reference.
  • Server software tuned to be able to run more virtual nodes.
  • Robustness of server code improved regarding server machine stops and restarts.
  • Robustness of automated upgrades improved.
  • For WALT developers: new trackexec module for advanced debugging and performance monitoring.
  • For WALT developers: new developer-oriented documentation.
  • For WALT developers: new option for getting a boot log of selected nodes (walt-init phase).
  • Database indexing improvement, code optimization, documentation updates, test suite updates, and other minor improvements.

Fixes:

  • Fix a communication issue when using python scripting features from a distant machine and transferring a large amount of data.
  • Fix occasionally wrong status of nodes (booted flag) when rebooting a large amount of nodes at once.
  • Fix detecting invalid image names with repeated colon characters.
  • Fix specific network configuration setups.
  • Fix booting a Raspberry Pi with a local OS on SD card first, and then on WALT without SD card.
  • Fix occasional issues related to SSH known-hosts files when working with unmanaged devices.
  • Security-related changes proposed by dependabot.
  • More minor fixes.

The OS of WALT server is now based on Debian 12 (codename “bookworm”).

Special thanks to the Schneider Electric team in Eybens for the extensive testing and support.

8.2 (September 1, 2023)

This is mostly a maintenance release.

New feature:

  • Permanent TCP redirections using the new expose setting of walt [node|device] config.

Improvement:

  • Smarter algorithm to analyse the internal configuration of switches and detect on which ports PoE devices are connected.

Fixes:

  • Fix rare issue with image management.
  • client-g5k: Fix usage of local vlans (was no longer working after a software update of G5K front-ends).
  • Accept an optional walt.image.preferred-name image label without the implicit :latest tag.
  • Accept a new format for the date of images imported from docker (i.e., when using walt image clone docker:<image>).
  • Apply security-related changes proposed by dependabot.

8.1 (June 27, 2023)

This is a maintenance release.

  • Fix an important issue with registration of new physical nodes.
  • Documentation and development scripts updates.

8.0 (June 23, 2023)

This is a long-awaited version with many new features:

  • New Python scripting API
  • Experimental support for running WalT on Grid'5000
  • Automated installation and upgrade procedures
  • Automatic power saving by powering off unused PoE nodes
  • Advanced bash completion for walt command
  • New command walt image build to build an image from a Dockerfile
  • New commands walt node [acquire|release] to clarify ownership concept
  • New command walt node console to display the console of virtual nodes
  • Optional use of private image registries (w/ or w/o the docker hub)
  • Google Coral Dev Boards supported as walt nodes
  • Experimental support for rpi-400 keyboard computers as walt nodes (please report any issue)
  • New walt images based on OpenWRT & Alpine (find them with walt image search)
  • Several features added to walt [node|device] config, e.g. define secondary networks on virtual nodes
  • Support for native PXE boot on PC nodes
  • More support for devices too weak to be treated as a fully-fledged “walt node”
  • Documentation online at https://walt.readthedocs.io/ (same content as walt help show)
  • Smarter walt device rescan network exploration (partial support for non-LLDP-compliant switches)
  • Improvements to internal monitoring of node statuses
  • Improvements about performance, user-friendliness and other topics
  • Bug fixes
  • Updated documentation & tests

7.0 (February 1, 2021)

This is a maintenance release. It brings:

  • Smarter topology discovery when nodes are moved (walt device rescan)
  • Two fixes for incompatible changes in recent versions of podman (a tool walt uses internally)
  • A fix regarding database handling when upgrading
  • A fix regarding walt vpn setup-node generating a corrupted image on first use
  • A fix regarding walt [node|image] cp when using a relative path as source
  • A minor improvement regarding PoE reboots and possible SNMP communication issues
  • A minor fix regarding life cycle of podman internal commands
  • Various walt command line tool minor improvements
  • Minor test suite improvements

6.0 (October 26, 2020)

This is a maintenance release. It brings:

  • A major fix regarding recent versions of podman and systemd which caused walt image shell to hang (unless walt-server-daemon was run manually, not as a systemd unit)
  • Updates to conform to recent docker hub API changes (walt now uses tool skopeo to interact with the docker hub)
  • A few minor fixes
  • An apt key update in the server-install-prod.dd.bz2 image (the apt repository for tools podman, buildah and skopeo has changed recently)

5.0 (September 8, 2020)

This release brings the following improvements:

  • Support for Raspberry Pi 4 boards.
  • Many improvements to the walt command, such as a new timeout option for walt node wait and walt log wait, or the ability to specify virtual node resources (RAM, number of CPU cores) using walt node config.
  • All nodes now have a directory /persist were you can save (possibly large) files: this directory is an NFS share linked to the server and is preserved across reboots.
  • Experimental support for distant nodes connecting through a ssh VPN (see walt help show vpn).
  • Walt server now maintains its own internal repository of docker images, different from the one used by docker command. walt image clone was updated to allow importing images managed by docker to this internal repository. Internally, walt now uses buildah and podman commands to manage its own repository. This change allowed us to discard the obsolete version of docker we were using before.
  • Walt now uses python3 instead of python2.
  • Updated documentation, including an upgrade procedure from previous version. Documentation is available by typing walt help show or online.
  • A few bugfixes over the previous release.

4.0 (May 16, 2019)

This release mainly brings the following improvements:

  • New installation documentation, available by typing walt help show or online.
  • A few fixes over the previous release.

Note: nobody remembers why no version 3.0 was released…

2.0 (April 29, 2019)

This release followed 3 years of development, and included many improvements and fixes. Among them:

  • WalT could now be installed on an existing network infrastructure.
  • WalT could handle much more kinds of nodes (PC-based, virtual nodes, and new models of Raspberry Pis).
  • Online documentation pages were available from the walt client tool.

1.0 (May 27, 2016)

First public version of WALT.

For the four previous years, WALT was used as an internal tool of the Drakkar team. This period allowed us to refine the general design and the user interfaces, because without external users, we allowed major compatibility breaks.

0.2 (September 29, 2014)

Complete overhaul started, introducing the client-server architecture, on a new git repository at https://github.com/drakkar-lig/walt-python-packages.

0.1 (some time by the end of 2012)

First prototype of WALT (unpublished).