[Libguestfs] ANNOUNCE: libnbd 1.0 & nbdkit 1.14 - high performance NBD client and server

I'm pleased to announce the joint release of libnbd 1.0 and nbdkit 1.14. These are a high performance NBD client library and server. Key features of libnbd: * Synchronous API for ease of use. * Asynchronous API for writing non-blocking, multithreaded clients. You can mix both APIs freely. * High performance. * Minimal dependencies for the basic library. * Well-documented, stable API. * Bindings in several programming languages. * Shell (nbdsh) for command line and scripting. Git: https://github.com/libguestfs/libnbd Download: http://download.libguestfs.org/libnbd/1.0-stable/ Fedora: https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/packageinfo?packageID=28807 Key features of nbdkit: * 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, Rust, shell script or Tcl. * Filters can be stacked in front of plugins to transform the output. Git: https://github.com/libguestfs/nbdkit Download: http://download.libguestfs.org/nbdkit/1.14-stable/ Fedora: https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/packageinfo?packageID=16469 Release notes for nbdkit 1.14: Server performance improvements: Nagle's algorithm is disabled; instead MSG_MORE is used to control when outgoing packets are sent. Ramdisk plugins now support more efficient zeroing. (Eric Blake). Plugins can now select their thread model at run time. Thread model selection is not finalized until after the config stage (Eric Blake). The server supports NBD_CMD_CACHE for prefetching. Plugins and filters have been updated to implement this where it makes sense (Eric Blake). Low level pthread lock failures now call abort(). This should never happen in real situations (Eric Blake). The server will not advertize multi-conn support if the internal thread model is serialized, avoiding a possible deadlock in some clients (Eric Blake). New server option ‘--no-sr’ can be used to disable structured replies (Eric Blake). The server will now refuse to start if stdin/stdout/stderr are closed, to avoid potential issues with file descriptor handling in plugins (Eric Blake). ‘$uri’ can be used to specify an NBD URI in ‘--run’ parameters (Eric Blake). New ‘stats’ filter displays elapsed statistics about NBD operations, such as the number of bytes read and written. New ‘nocache’ filter which disables cache requests, used to determine how effective they are (Eric Blake). New ‘noparallel’ filter which can be used to override the plugin’s own choice of thread model. Used to determine how the thread model affects performance, or to serialize plugins if required (Eric Blake). New ‘cacheextents’ filter to cache extents requests, especially useful with VDDK which has a slow implementation of extents (Martin Kletzander). In the ‘full’, ‘memory’, ‘null’, ‘pattern’ and ‘random’ plugins, the size= prefix can be omitted, ie: nbdkit memory 1G (instead of size=1G) The ‘nbd’ plugin has multiple enhancements: It may be built using libnbd instead of constructing raw NBD packets; NBD_OPT_GO is supported; add structured reads; implement NBD_CMD_BLOCK_STATUS; support TCP sockets; forward NBD_CMD_CACHE; retry connections; shared connections; magic ‘uri’ parameter; TLS support (Eric Blake). The ‘vddk’ plugin now reports hole extents correctly when using the ‘single-link’ flag (Martin Kletzander). The ‘cache’ and ‘cow’ filters now avoid copying data through a bounce buffer when it is already sufficiently aligned (Eric Blake). Filters (such as the delay and rate filter) which sleep no longer cause long delays when the server is shut down (Eric Blake). Multiple fixes to the ‘rust’ plugin (Martin Kletzander). Multiple enhancements and clean ups to the test suite which should make tests better and more reliable. OCaml plugins can now use ‘parse_size’, ‘parse_bool’, ‘read_password’ calls, and there is also a new example plugin. On platforms which lack atomic O_CLOEXEC support the most serialized thread model is always selected to avoid leaking file descriptors (Eric Blake). -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com virt-builder quickly builds VMs from scratch http://libguestfs.org/virt-builder.1.html