NAME

       libnbd-release-notes-1.8 - release notes for libnbd 1.8

DESCRIPTION

       These are the release notes for libnbd stable release 1.8.  This describes the major
       changes since 1.6.

       libnbd 1.8.0 was released on 7 June 2021.

       libnbd is now hosted on gitlab:
       https://listman.redhat.com/archives/libguestfs/2021-February/msg00021.html

   Security
       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).

       There was one security bug found in libnbd during this release cycle.

       CVE-2021-20286 denial of service when using nbd_set_opt_mode(3)

       See the full announcement here:
       https://listman.redhat.com/archives/libguestfs/2021-March/msg00092.html (Found and fixed
       by Eric Blake).

   New APIs
       nbd_get_private_data(3)
       nbd_set_private_data(3)
           These calls allow you to store either an unsigned integer or a pointer in the handle
           for the application to use for its own purposes.

       nbd_get_uri(3)
           This call constructs an NBD URI which can be used to connect back to the same server
           (using nbd_connect_uri(3) or from other tools that support the NBD URI standard).

   Enhancements to existing APIs
       Numeric IPv6 URIs (like "nbd://[::1]/") are now supported.

       libnbd gives a better error message if the server backlog overflows (thanks Xin Long,
       Lukas Doktor, Eric Blake, Martin Kletzander).

   New features
       Continuous integration (CI) tests now run on every commit and merge request to the
       upstream repository (Martin Kletzander).

   Tools
       A great deal of work has been done to improve the performance of nbdcopy(1) (Nir Soffer,
       Eric Blake).

       On Linux, nbdcopy now uses readahead when reading from files, and takes steps to preserve
       the host page cache.

       nbdcopy new --request-size option to allow controlling the size of requests made to NBD
       servers.  Adjusting this can affect performance (Nir Soffer).

       nbdcopy now supports "null:" pseudo-target, where it discards the output.  This is useful
       for benchmarking.

       nbdcopy new -v flag to enable libnbd and other debugging.

       nbdinfo(1) --list (which lists all exports of a server) no longer exits early if one of
       the exports is inaccessible or there is a recoverable error (Eric Blake).

       nbdinfo now prints the URI of each export in the output making it easier to connect back
       to each export.

       nbdfuse(1) is now multithreaded and supports issuing parallel NBD commands on a single
       connection as well as multi-conn, and other enhancements have been made.  This resulted in
       around 50% performance improvement when tested with fio.

       nbdfuse now supports nbdcopy-style "[ CMD ]", eg:
        nbdfuse dir/ramdisk [ nbdkit memory 1G ]

       nbdfuse now supports trimming.  Also it supports fast zeroing, but this requires a
       forthcoming kernel patch before it will work.

       nbdfuse sets the virtual file permissions appropriately if the NBD export is read-only.

       nbdfuse new -v flag to enable libnbd and other debugging.

   Tests
       Added a test of interoperability with qemu-storage-daemon(1).  Note that qemu-storage-
       daemon was broken in qemu 6.0.0 so this test can fail unless you update to a fixed version
       (thanks Stefan Hajnoczi, Daniel Berrangé).

       Added a test of nbdcopy with TLS which was previously untested.

       Python code style tests are now opt-in using
        ./configure --enable-python-code-style

       More tests should now run on FreeBSD and not be skipped.

       nbdfuse tests now ensure that errors from NBD are transmitted through FUSE back to the
       local client.

       "MALLOC_CHECK_" and "MALLOC_PERTURB_" are only enabled when running the tests, not when
       running libnbd programs from the build directory.  This makes it easier to do benchmarks.

   Other improvements and bug fixes
       The minimum C compiler is now ISO C99 (previously ANSI C90).

       FUSE 3 (instead of FUSE 2) is now required to build nbdfuse.

       The library tries harder not to leak thread-local storage memory on dlclose or exit.
       (Because of the design of Linux it is not always possible to avoid this, especially in
       multithreaded programs.)

       Fix the progress bar in nbdcopy(1).

       UTF-8 export names are now processed and displayed properly by nbdinfo(1).

       The --help output of nbdcopy, nbdfuse and nbdinfo now displays a brief summary of all
       options and has some examples.

       The generator now only requires ocamlc, not ocamlfind (Abhay Raj Singh).

       Golang bindings now use and require golang modules.

   Documentation
       Document using libnbd with the Meson build system.

       Added Python examples.

       Add example of how to integrate libnbd with libev (Nir Soffer).

SEE ALSO

       libnbd(3).

AUTHORS

       Eric Blake

       Richard W.M. Jones

       Martin Kletzander

       Nir Soffer

COPYRIGHT

       Copyright (C) 2021 Red Hat Inc.

LICENSE

       This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of
       the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either
       version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

       This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY;
       without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
       See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details.

       You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License along with this
       library; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth
       Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA