I'm pleased to announce new stable releases of nbdkit 1.38 and libnbd 1.20. nbdkit is a Network Block Device (NBD) server with a stable plugin ABI and a permissive license. libnbd is an NBD client library in userspace. Largely these are bug fix releases, but there are some interesting new features such as the new Google Cloud Server plugin for nbdkit, enhancements to nbdinfo, and OCaml zero-copy support, nbdkit 1.38.0 can be downloaded here: https://download.libguestfs.org/nbdkit/1.38-stable/ git here: https://gitlab.com/nbdkit/nbdkit libnbd 1.20.0 can be downloaded here: https://download.libguestfs.org/libnbd/1.20-stable/ git here: https://gitlab.com/nbdkit/libnbd Release notes for nbdkit 1.38 online: https://libguestfs.org/nbdkit-release-notes-1.38.1.html Release notes for libnbd 1.20 online: https://libguestfs.org/libnbd-release-notes-1.20.1.html ----- nbdkit-release-notes-1.38 - release notes for nbdkit 1.38 DESCRIPTION These are the release notes for nbdkit stable release 1.38. This describes the major changes since 1.36. nbdkit 1.38.0 was released on 5 April 2024. Security No security issues were found in this release. All past security issues and information about how to report new ones can be found in nbdkit-security(1). Plugins New nbdkit-gcs-plugin(1) providing support for Google Cloud Storage (Mykola Ivanets). nbdkit-data-plugin(1), nbdkit-memory-plugin(1), nbdkit-floppy-plugin(1), nbdkit-iso-plugin(1), nbdkit-sparse-random-plugin(1) and nbdkit-torrent-plugin(1) all now advertise suitable minimum, preferred and maximum block sizes, which means clients should be able to access them more efficiently. nbdkit-vddk-plugin(1) now supports VDDK up to version 8.0.2.1. nbdkit-S3-plugin(1) now reads sensitive tokens as passwords, allowing more flexibility on how to safely pass them to nbdkit. Filters New nbdkit-readonly-filter(1) which allows more fine-grained control over whether a plugin is read-only (and also to change it at runtime) compared to the normal nbdkit -r command line option. Language bindings nbdkit-python-plugin(3) adds bindings for "nbdkit.is_tls", "nbdkit.stdio_safe", "nbdkit.nanosleep" "nbdkit.peer_pid", "nbdkit.peer_uid", "nbdkit.peer_gid", "nbdkit.peer_security_context", "nbdkit.read_password". nbdkit-ocaml-plugin(3) implements zero-copy pread and pwrite calls. This change is not backwards compatible for OCaml plugin code. (Thanks Nicolas Ojeda Bar, Anil Madhavapeddy, Simon Cruanes). nbdkit-ocaml-plugin also adds extra OCaml version information to --dump-plugin output; and adds an example of how to use debug flags. nbdkit-rust-plugin(3) minimum Rust version (MSRV) increased to 1.63.0. Various issues found by clippy have been fixed (Alan Somers). Server New --no-meta-contexts (--no-mc) option which stops the server from advertising metadata contexts, improving interoperability testing (Eric Blake). nbdkit --dump-plugin outputs additional fields: The internal "soext", either "so" or "dll" so you can tell what plugin/filter extension the server is looking for. The "max_api_version" is the maximum plugin API version supported. Bug fixes Fix compilation with GCC 14 (Florian Weimer). Fix the default block size exposed by nbdkit-S3-plugin(1), fix the zero callback, and other bug fixes (Mykola Ivanets). nbdkit-luks-filter(1) could enter an infinite loop in some error cases (Wilko Nienhaus). Several plugins would crash or behave strangely if no parameters were passed. These have been fixed and a regression test added. Documentation Update fio benchmarking documentation (Eric Blake). Add example of how to export a variable to --run subcommands (Eric Blake). Tests Fix Cirros CI tests (Peter Krempa). Build bash ≥ 4 is required. (This was always true, but now the ./configure script checks it.) You can now use both environment variables "NBDKIT_VALGRIND=1 NBDKIT_GDB=1" together to run valgrind and gdbserver, in order to debug valgrinded nbdkit and plugins. Internals Important internal structs now contain magic values which are checked by optional assertions, improving type safety. SEE ALSO nbdkit(1). AUTHORS Authors of nbdkit 1.38: Alan Somers Eric Blake Mykola Ivanets Peter Krempa Richard W.M. Jones libnbd-release-notes-1.20 - release notes for libnbd 1.20 DESCRIPTION These are the release notes for libnbd stable release 1.20. This describes the major changes since 1.18. libnbd 1.20.0 was released on 5 April 2024. Security Fuzzing found and Eric Blake fixed an assertion which could be triggered by connecting to a malicious server. This was assigned CVE-2023-5871 (low severity). See the announcement here: https://lists.libguestfs.org/archives/list/guestfs@lists.libguestfs.org/t... If you find a security issue, please read SECURITY in the source (online here: https://gitlab.com/nbdkit/libnbd/blob/master/SECURITY). To find out about previous security issues in libnbd, see libnbd-security(3). Enhancements to existing APIs nbd_connect_uri(3) now correctly supports case insensitive URIs. Protocol Improve interop with nbd-server(1) which supports structured replies but not meta context (Eric Blake). Tools nbdinfo(1) adds support for --isnt, --cannot, --hasnt, which lets you check if features of an NBD server are not supported. nbdinfo(1) adds support for --uri which just prints the canonical URI of the server. nbdinfo(1) now prints human sizes for block size constraints (Eric Blake). Language bindings New libnbd-rust(3) manual page added, providing an overview for writing Rust programs using libnbd. Rust documentation has been improved by using a custom translator from our own documentation format (Perl POD) to rustdoc. Some Rust compiler warnings were fixed (Eric Blake). OCaml bindings now support zero-copy in AIO pread and pwrite functions. This change is backwards compatible with existing code. (Thanks Nicolas Ojeda Bar, Anil Madhavapeddy, Simon Cruanes). OCaml bindings now use "Gc.finalize" (OCaml-level finalizers instead of C-level finalizers) which improves compatibility in OCaml 5.1.1 and above (Guillaume Munch-Maccagnoni). OCaml ≥ 4.05 is formally required and checked in ./configure. Previously we did not specify a minimum version of OCaml, but in practice versions older than 4.05 probably didn't work. Tests Fuzzing approach was changed to use asynchronous commands. This improves speed of fuzzing greatly and should find more issues. Multiple CI fixes (Eric Blake). Respect the user's choice of qemu-nbd, nbdkit and other binaries from (eg) "./configure NBDKIT=/some/nbdkit". Previously we would often test against binaries found on the path even if the user had specified other binaries to use. Other improvements and bug fixes nbdinfo(1) now gracefully disconnects from the server in error cases, improving output (Eric Blake). "struct nbd_handle" now contains a magic value which is checked on entry to libnbd, which should identify mistakes where programs calling libnbd pass in an incorrect pointer. Documentation An example was added of how to use userfaultfd to mmap an NBD-backed drive. See examples/userfault-map.c in the libnbd sources. Documentation of acceptable handle states in the man pages has been improved. Build contrib/libnbd.m4 is a contributed configure test for libnbd (Bruno Haible). "./configure --with-bash-completions" will now fail if the required bash-completions package is not installed. SEE ALSO libnbd(3). AUTHORS Eric Blake Richard W.M. Jones Thomas Weißschuh -- 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