ANNOUNCE: nbdkit 1.38 and libnbd 1.20 released
by Richard W.M. Jones
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
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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
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