Linkerd Edge Release Roundup: August 2023

Linkerd’s edge releases are a big part of our development process, and there have been a lot of them - five! - since our last edge-release roundup. The plan is do these roundups more frequently to keep things manageable, but for this one, we’ll hit some highlights and then do a release-by-release list at the end.

Community Contributions

We couldn’t do what we do without the Linkerd community, and this batch of releases is definitely no exception. Huge thanks to @hiteshwani29, Abhijeet Gaurav, Grégoire Bellon-Gervais, Harsh Soni, Jean-Charles Legras, and Miguel Elias dos Santos for their contributions across a wide range of areas, from the Linkerd CLI to host networking! You’ll find more information about all of these contributions in the release-by-release details below.

Gateway API

From the feature perspective, our main focus over the last several edge releases has been improving our Gateway API support, bringing us closer to feature parity between HTTPRoutes and ServiceProfiles:

We added support for the Gateway API’s gateway.networking.k8s.io APIGroup to Linkerd in edge-23.7.1 on July 7th. This is a major step toward conformance with the Gateway API’s Mesh profile. (We’re not turning off support for policy.linkerd.io though, that’s still quite a ways away.)
We added support for HTTPRoutes defined in the namespace from which a route is called in edge-23.7.3 on July 28th. The Gateway API calls these consumer routes since the use case is, usually, doing things like overriding the timeout for a workload you’re calling. You can learn more about this in the Gateway API Mesh routing documentation.
We also made HTTPRoute parentRefs port numbers optional in edge-23.7.3, per the HTTPRoute standard.
Finally, we started adding support for HTTPRoute filters: RequestHeaderModifier and RequestRedirect are supported in edge-23.7.2, and ResponseHeaderModifier is supported in edge-23.7.3 (so edge-23.7.2 added header modifications for requests, and edge-23.7.3 added header modifications for responses).

Fixes

Of the many fixes in these five releases, two in particular stand out:

In edge-23.7.3, we fixed a race condition where the Linkerd destination controller could panic in an environment with high churn of Endpoints or Servers. The most common effect here is seeing restarts of the destination controller Pods, but it could also result in traffic being sent to the wrong destination endpoints.
This is covered in Linkerd issue #11163.
In edge-23.8.1, we raised the default capacities of the HTTP request queues (both inbound and outbound) back to 10,000 after lowering them for Linkerd 2.13. The effect here is that in situations where a single destination workload needed to accept a lot of concurrent traffic, the Linkerd proxies would decide that they had too much load, and start shedding it by dropping connections. This happened much more agressively in Linkerd 2.13 than in Linkerd 2.12; it’s fixed in edge-23.8.1.
This is covered in Linkerd issue #11055 and PR #11198.

Installing the Latest Edge Release

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSfL https://run.linkerd.io/install-edge | sh

How to give feedback

We would be delighted to hear how these releases work out for you! The full changelogs are at https://github.com/linkerd/linkerd2/releases/tag/edge-23.6.3, https://github.com/linkerd/linkerd2/releases/tag/edge-23.7.1, https://github.com/linkerd/linkerd2/releases/tag/edge-23.7.2, https://github.com/linkerd/linkerd2/releases/tag/edge-23.7.3, and https://github.com/linkerd/linkerd2/releases/tag/edge-23.8.1. We’d love to hear your feedback on Slack or at the new Buoyant Linkerd Forum. Looking forward to hearing from you – happy meshing!!

Release Details

edge-23.6.3, on June 30th, was all about a couple of community contributions:
- @hiteshwani29 added JSONpath output to linkerd viz tap.
- Jean-Charles Legras fixed a proxy startup failure that could happen with the config.linkerd.io/admin-port annotation.
edge-23.7.1, on July 7th, started our Gateway API theme and also made a couple of fixes:
- We added support for the Gateway API’s gateway.networking.k8s.io APIGroup to Linkerd (a major step toward conformance with the Gateway API’s Mesh profile).
- We fixed a problem where the ingress-mode proxy wouldn’t always correctly use ServiceProfiles for destinations with no HTTPRoutes.
- We added distinguishable version information to the proxy’s logs and metrics.
edge-23.7.2, on July 13th, continued the Gateway API theme and pulled in a community fix:
- We added support for HTTPRoute’s RequestHeaderModifier and RequestRedirect [filters].
- Miguel Elias dos Santos fixed a linkerd-cni chart problem that could block the CNI pods from coming up when the injector was broken.
edge-23.7.3, on July 28th, was our largest edge release: it had a lot of Gateway API work and several fixes.
- We made HTTPRoute parentRefs port numbers optional, per the HTTPRoute standard.
- We added support for Gateway API consumer routes.
- We added support for HTTPRoute’s ResponseHeaderModifier filter.
- Grégoire Bellon-Gervais fixed a Grafana error caused by an incorrect datasource.
- Harsh Soni fixed the linkerd extension CLI commands so that they prefer the --register flag over the LINKERD_DOCKER_REGISTRY environment variable, for consistency.
- We fixed a race condition that could cause the destination controller to panic.
- We added high-availability mode for the multicluster service mirror, and further improved control-plane logging.
- We added support for disabling the network validator security context if you’re in an environment that defines its own security context.
Last but not least: edge-23.8.1, on August 3rd, brought in a couple of very important bugfixes:
- Abhijeet Gaurav made it possible to use the linkerd-cni DaemonSet without needing host networking support.
- We raised the default capacities of the HTTP request queues back to 10,000.

Linkerd generally does new edge releases weekly; watch this space to keep up-to-date. Feedback on this blog series is welcome! Just ping @flynn on the Linkerd Slack.