NBD 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, Perl, Python, OCaml, Ruby or [new!] Tcl. I'm pleased to announce the release of the new stable branch 1.4. Download it here: http://download.libguestfs.org/nbdkit/1.4-stable/ There are many new features since the previous stable branch (1.2): * You can write plugins in Tcl. * Other new plugins: ext2, random, zero. * New filters: blocksize, fua, log, nozero, * Bash tab completion of nbdkit commands. * TLS Pre-Shared Keys (PSK) authentication. * We now default to the newstyle protocol, use -o to select oldstyle. * On-demand ramping of thread pool. * TRIM support in the file plugin. * Reworked error handling. * New can_zero, can_fua methods and better handling of FUA. * New nbdkit_realpath function. * nbdkit_parse_size rewritten. * Better handling of shutdown path to ensure plugins can do long cleanups. * New PKG_CHECK_VAR variables. * Regression test for IPv6 connections. * Of course numerous smaller bug fixes and improvements. Thanks in particular to Eric Blake and Pino Toscano. Rich. -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com virt-df lists disk usage of guests without needing to install any software inside the virtual machine. Supports Linux and Windows. http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-df/