Plugins for libstrongswan and charon can optionally be loaded according to a configuration in strongswan.conf. Most components provide a "load = " option followed by a space separated list of plugins to load. This allows e.g. the fallback from a hardware crypto accelerator to to software-based crypto plugins.
Charons SQL plugin has been extended by a virtual IP address pool. Configurations with a rightsourceip=%poolname setting query a SQLite or MySQL database for leases. The "ipsec pool" command helps in administrating the pool database. See ipsec pool --help for the available options
The Authenticated Encryption Algorithms AES-CCM-8/12/16 and AES-GCM-8/12/16 for ESP are now supported starting with the Linux 2.6.25 kernel. The syntax is e.g. esp=aes128ccm12 or esp=aes256gcm16.