Citrus · News

Second beta — faster upload and download, lower latency under load

Sun, 18 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The second beta release, v1.0.0-beta.2, is out. The full list of changes is in the changelog.

Four servers compared (#126)

Citrus, Xray v26.10.17, sing-box v1.14.3 and mihomo v1.19.32 were measured as servers on one host, eight protocols, the same clients for all. The results:

Citrus leads upload: REALITY with 32 streams is 52% faster than the best of the others, and single-stream upload on REALITY and SS2022 is 40–49% faster.
Citrus uses the least memory per idle tunnel on most protocols.
sing-box leads AnyTLS, TUIC new connections and SS2022 download.
Xray leads Trojan and SS2022 upload with 32 streams.

These numbers were measured before the changes below. The method, the caveats and every table are in test/bench/compare/results/2026-10-18-four-cores/RESULTS.md in the repository.

Merged after the comparison

Download (#124). 64 KiB reads, and TLS records go to the socket together (in the getmikan/tls and getmikan/utls forks). With 32 streams, as the bench reports them: REALITY 2802 → 4235 MB/s, Trojan 2737 → 3936, SS2022 3895 → 4392.
Latency under load (#131). An echo next to eight downloads: 55–63 → 20 ms. For comparison, Xray is at about 77 ms and sing-box on SS2022 at about 47.
Idle tunnel memory (#129). Trojan −36% (37.7 KiB, below sing-box’s 43.6), AnyTLS −18%, REALITY −12%.
QUIC (#125). The gap to sing-box on new streams went from 10–12% down to 4–6%.

Upload write batching (#119) and fewer allocations per new connection (#118) were in dev before the comparison; its numbers already include them.

Fixes

TUIC: a CONNECT with a 255-byte domain no longer crashes the server before authentication (#125).
smux is replaced with the getmikan/smux fork: after an error a caller’s buffer is no longer sent (#123).
Limits: a race when closing a user over quota no longer touches the user’s new connections (#116).

CI

A -race job for the packages without races (#121).
A nightly performance check against mihomo (#127).

Known issues

The TUIC server accepts at most 2048 streams per QUIC connection. A client that opens more without waiting for stream credit (the sing-box client does this) gets errors on the extra ones.

The AnyTLS rework (#130) is planned for the next beta. The rest is on the Roadmap.

Audit closed, cascades, events, unix sockets and DNSCrypt

Thu, 15 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Everything below is merged into dev and not in a release yet. To try it, build the core from source. The full list is in the changelog.

The audit is closed

The static audit of the core has been worked through: its findings were fixed in a series of PRs from #75 to #97, each with a test that fails on the old code. What users will notice most:

a controller on a network address needs a secret, and on loopback without a secret it refuses browser requests from other sites;
the HTTP proxy authenticates every request, UDP through SOCKS5 is bound to its user and port, and a password change closes sessions;
self-update checks the package against the release’s checksums.txt;
a public provider URL cannot redirect into a private network, and paths are checked with symlinks resolved;
state a client creates before authentication is bounded in every protocol;
GitHub Actions and images are pinned by digest.

Some of these need config changes: they are collected on the new Migrating from mihomo page. How to report a vulnerability and what has been done to harden the core is on the Security page.

Cascades (#73)

The new type: chain group builds a chain of proxies and groups: the first hop is the entry, the last one is the exit.

proxy-groups:
  - name: exits
    type: url-test
    proxies: [exit-de, exit-nl]
    url: https://cp.cloudflare.com/generate_204
  - name: cascade
    type: chain
    proxies: [entry, exits]   # entry → best exit
    url: https://cp.cloudflare.com/generate_204
    interval: 300

When the chain fails, the health check finds the first broken hop and reports it in /proxies, /metrics and a chain.health event. More on the Chains page.

The event stream (#70)

GET /events streams core events over WebSocket, SSE or NDJSON: authentication, limits that kick in, user changes, config reloads, provider updates, listener and chain state. A panel no longer has to poll /traffic/users and /limits/users to learn that a quota ran out. See Events.

Unix sockets (#68)

TCP listeners (VLESS, Trojan, TrustTunnel, HTTP, SOCKS and more) can listen on a unix socket: listen: unix:/run/citrus/vless.sock. That makes it easy to put a node behind nginx or Caddy, with the real client address passed through trusted-proxy-header and trusted-proxies: [loopback].

DNSCrypt (#63)

DNSCrypt v2 servers are set as sdns:// stamps in nameserver. Queries go through the same dialer as the other DNS clients, so #proxy and the rules apply and nothing leaks under TUN. No third-party DNSCrypt library was needed.

mihomo clients (#74)

A new interop suite runs the official mihomo v1.19.31 and v1.19.32 releases as clients against a Citrus server, the way the apps of Mikan users work. All 31 cases pass: REALITY with post-quantum settings, XHTTP, WebSocket, gRPC, Trojan, Shadowsocks 2022, Hysteria2, TUIC v5, AnyTLS, TrustTunnel, Snell, Mieru, Sudoku, HTTP and SOCKS. No incompatibility was found. The table is on the Compatibility page.

Also

PUT /rules replaces the rules without a config reload (#64).
XHTTP over h2 uses half the CPU per gigabyte (#53), and an idle connection takes 30 KB less memory (#52).
JSON logs for Loki and ELK: log-format: json (#65).
The getmikan/tls and getmikan/utls forks carry the TLS security fixes from Go 1.26 (#58).

What comes next, the first release and moving the Mikan panel to Citrus, is on the Roadmap.

Post-quantum REALITY, faster XHTTP through CDNs, and a protocol cleanup

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Everything below is merged into the dev branch but is not in a release or prerelease yet. dev is no longer packaged as Prerelease-dev, so for now the only way to try it is to build the core from source on the dev branch.

Post-quantum REALITY (#8, #10)

Since Xray 26.9.8, a REALITY server silently drops any ClientHello without an X25519MLKEM768 key share placed before X25519, so earlier Citrus could not connect to current Xray servers.

Client (reality-opts)

X25519MLKEM768 is on by default. support-x25519mlkem768: false sends the classical hello for old servers. Fingerprints without ML-KEM (ios, edge, randomized and others) get the key share added.
client-version: the Xray version the client reports to the server. Defaults to 26.10.10, instead of the hard-coded 1.8.2, so servers with minClientVer accept it.
mldsa65-verify: checks the ML-DSA-65 signature in the temporary certificate, like Xray’s mldsa65Verify (pqv in share links).
client-fingerprint: firefox and safari now send the real Firefox 148 and Safari 26.3 hellos from our getmikan/utls fork. Xray names such as hellofirefox_148, hellosafari_26_3 and hellochrome_131 are accepted too.

proxies:
  - name: vless-reality-vision
    type: vless
    server: server
    port: 443
    uuid: uuid
    network: tcp
    tls: true
    flow: xtls-rprx-vision
    servername: www.microsoft.com
    client-fingerprint: chrome
    reality-opts:
      public-key: xxx
      short-id: xxx
      # support-x25519mlkem768: true  # default; false only for old servers
      # client-version: 26.10.10      # default
      # mldsa65-verify: xxx           # ML-DSA-65 public key (pqv)

Server (reality-config on inbounds)

mldsa65-seed: signs the temporary certificate with ML-DSA-65, like Xray’s mldsa65Seed. The dest certificate chain must be at least about 3.5 KB, or the signature does not fit and the handshake fails. Xray has the same limit.
require-x25519mlkem768: only accept clients with X25519MLKEM768; the rest fall back to dest.
min-client-ver and max-client-ver: the accepted range of client versions.

listeners:
  - name: vless-in
    type: vless
    port: 443
    users:
      - username: 1
        uuid: uuid
        flow: xtls-rprx-vision
    reality-config:
      dest: test.com:443
      private-key: xxx   # citrus generate reality-keypair
      short-id:
        - 0123456789abcdef
      server-names:
        - test.com
      # max-time-difference: 60000     # milliseconds
      # mldsa65-seed: xxx              # xray mldsa65
      # require-x25519mlkem768: true
      # min-client-ver: 26.9.8
      # max-client-ver: 26.10.10

Live-tested against Xray 26.10.10 (VLESS + Vision + REALITY) in both directions, a Citrus client to an Xray server and an Xray client to a Citrus server, with and without ML-DSA-65. A wrong key is rejected.

Behaviour change. max-time-difference is now in milliseconds, like Xray’s maxTimeDiff. It used to be read as microseconds, so a value copied from an Xray config allowed 1000 times less clock skew. If you tuned the value for the old unit, divide it by 1000.

Every key is described in the config reference.

XHTTP through CDNs (#9)

In packet-up mode the next POST no longer waits for the previous response, as in Xray. Through a CDN each POST used to cost a full client → CDN → origin round trip, so upload was bound by latency. In a live test against Xray 26.10.10 a packet-up request took 0.4 s instead of 5.4 s. Over HTTP/1.1 responses are still awaited.
x-padding-bytes: "0-0" now means Xray’s default padding (100–1000 bytes) instead of none.
A path with a query, such as /xh?ed=2048, is sent as a path and a query, as in Xray, instead of an escaped %3F inside the path.

Legacy protocols removed (#7)

ShadowsocksR, Hysteria v1, TUIC v4, Shadowsocks stream ciphers (rc4-md5, aes-ctr/cfb, chacha20 and others) and v2ray-plugin are gone. Shadowsocks accepts only none, AEAD and 2022-blake3-*. VMess stays for now.

In a proxy provider such a node is skipped with a warning, and the rest of the subscription loads.
In the main config it is an error with a clear message, for example “TUIC v4 is no longer supported, use uuid/password (v5)”.

Rejected-auth journal (#5)

The component/authevent package reports failed logins on TrustTunnel, REALITY, AnyTLS, VLESS, Trojan, TUIC v5, Hysteria2 and Sudoku inbounds: protocol, addresses and reason, never credentials. It is the core side of a journal of rejected requests in the panel. Events go through a queue and never slow down the handshake.

Data races in Vision and AnyTLS (#11)

Fixed the data races go test -race found in the XTLS Vision filter and reader and in the AnyTLS stream. After the first packets, the Vision hot path costs one atomic load.

Citrus is live

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Citrus is the network core of Mikan, a fork of MetaCubeX/mihomo. The core now lives in its own repository, getmikan/Citrus, with the upstream history and authorship kept, and ships its own releases.

How development works

Two branches: dev and main. Every pull request goes to dev; main only gets merges from dev.
Each branch builds its own prerelease: Prerelease-dev and Prerelease-main. Stable versions ship as tagged releases.
Changes from mihomo come in as separate PRs to dev.

See Contributing for details.

What is planned

These are plans, not finished work:

Drop legacy protocols, starting with VMess.
Xray interoperability, including post-quantum REALITY: X25519MLKEM768 key exchange and ML-DSA-65 signatures.
xhttp fixes.

We will post here as each step lands in a release.