[Libguestfs] ANNOUNCE: nbdkit 1.8 - an NBD server toolkit with stable plugin API and permissive license

I’m pleased to announce the next stable release of nbdkit. 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/1.8-stable/ (other downloads: http://download.libguestfs.org/nbdkit/ ) New in this release: - New plugin: ‘sh’ for running shell scripts and other external programs. (https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2018/09/09/write-nbdkit-plugins-in-shell-script/) - New plugin: ‘partitioning’ which creates a partitioned disk from a list of partitions in files. - New plugin: ‘iso’ which creates an ISO (CD-ROM) image on the fly from a directory of files. (https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2018/10/18/new-in-nbdkit-create-an-iso-image-o...) - New plugin: ‘floppy’ which creates a virtual FAT-formatted floppy disk from a directory of files. (https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2018/10/29/new-in-nbdkit-create-a-virtual-flop...) - Magic config key allows simpler invocation of many plugins, eg: nbdkit file file=foo becomes: nbdkit file foo - data: Add disk2data.pl script to generate data parameters. - data: Use ‘<file’ to inline a file. - vddk: Use ‘-D vddk.diskinfo=1’ to enable extra debug information. - tests: Use a helper function to refactor and simplify most tests. - partition filter: Can handle > 128 GPT partitions. - nbdkit can be compiled on the Haiku operating system (François Revol). - New nbdkit_parse_bool API for parsing boolean parameters (Eric Blake). - log: Add logappend=[true|false] (Eric Blake). - ocaml: New set_error and debug calls. - Analyze code under AddressSanitizer and ThreadSanitizer and fix bugs (Eric Blake). - Analyze code under Coverity and fix bugs. - Tests now run more quickly. Rich. -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com virt-top is 'top' for virtual machines. Tiny program with many powerful monitoring features, net stats, disk stats, logging, etc. http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-top