Libguestfs - Jan 2019 - ANNOUNCE: nbdkit 1.10 - an NBD server toolkit with stable plugin API and permissive license

I’m pleased to announce the next stable release of nbdkit.  This
release concentrates on performance and fuzzing, along with numerous
other enhancements (full list below).

NBD — Network Block Device — is a protocol for accessing Block Devices
(hard disks and disk-like things) over a Network.  nbdkit is a toolkit
for creating NBD servers.

The key features are:

 * Multithreaded NBD server written in C with good performance.
 * Minimal dependencies for the basic server.
 * Liberal license (BSD) allows nbdkit to be linked to proprietary
   libraries or included in proprietary code.
 * Well-documented, simple plugin API with a stable ABI guarantee.
   Lets you export “unconventional” block devices easily.
 * You can write plugins in C, Lua, Perl, Python, OCaml, Ruby,
   [new!] shell script or Tcl.
 * Filters can be stacked in front of plugins to transform the output.

    Clone source: https://github.com/libguestfs/nbdkit
Download tarball: http://download.libguestfs.org/nbdkit/1.10-stable/
(other downloads: http://download.libguestfs.org/nbdkit/ )

New in this release:

- Implemented NBD_FLAG_CAN_MULTI_CONN which greatly improves
  performance for clients that support it.

- Implemented NBD_OPT_INFO (Eric Blake).

- nbdkit-data-plugin and nbdkit-memory-plugin: By adding fine-grained
  locking, these plugins now use the fully parallel thread model.

- nbdkit-cache-filter: The size of the cache can now be limited, and
  the cache reclaims space using an LRU algorithm.  It has also been
  enhanced to support cache-on-read mode.  The filter now uses a fully
  parallel thread model.

- nbdkit-cow-filter: Use a fully parallel thread model.

- nbdkit-sh-plugin: Inline scripts:
  https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2018/12/15/nbdkit-inline-scripts/

- nbdkit-sh-plugin: Full API version 2 is now supported.

- OCaml bindings: Full API version 2 is now supported.

- nbdkit-delay-filter allows you to specify the read, write, zero and
  trim delays individually.

- nbdkit-curl-plugin: Add support for connecting to servers over Unix
  domain sockets.

- Bash tab completion has been improved: Partial plugin names are
  expanded correctly, and plugin parameters containing '-' work.

- Public header files can now be consumed by ISO C90 compilers (but
  GCC or Clang is still required to compile nbdkit itself).

- A better non-cryptographically secure pseudo-random number generator
  (xoshiro256** 1.0) is now used on all platforms, replacing previous
  uses of random(3).

- Fuzzing using American Fuzzy Lop is now supported, and was carried
  out, resulting in one error being found in the server (not security
  related).

- New nbdkit-xz-filter: This replaces nbdkit-xz-plugin which will be
  removed in nbdkit 1.12.

- New nbdkit-loop(1) man page documenting how to use nbdkit for loop
  mounts.  See also:
  https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/nbdkit/

- New nbdkit-full-plugin: Returns ENOSPC on every request.

- attribute((format)), attribute((nonnull)) and attribute((sentinel))
  are used in internal header files to improve code quality.

- Logging using %m now works on all platforms, not just on Linux with
  glibc (Eric Blake).

- VPATH builds partially supported (Eric Blake).

Rich.

-- 
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