I'm pleased to announce a new high performance Network Block Device (NBD) client library called libnbd. It's written in C and there are also bindings available for Python, OCaml and (soon) Rust. 0.9.8 is the third pre-release before the stable 1.0 version where we freeze the API, so feedback on API-related issues is very welcome now. Download: http://download.libguestfs.org/libnbd/ Documentation: https://github.com/libguestfs/libnbd/blob/master/docs/libnbd.pod Fedora package: https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/packageinfo?packageID=28807 Debian package: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=933223 Git repo: https://github.com/libguestfs/libnbd Mailing list: libguestfs@redhat.com (no subscription required) Here are some of the things you can do with this library ... Connect to an NBD server and grab the first sector of the disk: https://github.com/libguestfs/libnbd/blob/a5f8fd2f0f48e9cf2487e23750b55f67b1... High performance multi-threaded reads and writes, with multiple connections and multiple commands in flight on each connection: https://github.com/libguestfs/libnbd/blob/master/examples/threaded-reads-and... Integrate with glib main loop: https://github.com/libguestfs/libnbd/blob/master/examples/glib-main-loop.c Connect to an NBD server from an interactive shell: $ nbdkit -f linuxdisk . & $ nbdsh --connect nbd://localhost Welcome to nbdsh, the shell for interacting with Network Block Device (NBD) servers. nbd> h.get_size() 716266496 nbd> buf = h.pread (512, 0) nbd> print ("%r" % buf) [prints the first sector] Use ‘fio’ to benchmark an NBD server: $ nbdkit -U - memory size=256M \ --run 'export unixsocket ; fio examples/nbd.fio ' Rich. -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com libguestfs lets you edit virtual machines. Supports shell scripting, bindings from many languages. http://libguestfs.org