[Libguestfs] ANNOUNCE: nbdkit 1.28 and libnbd 1.10 released
Richard W.M. Jones
rjones at redhat.com
Thu Sep 23 18:25:46 UTC 2021
nbdkit is a Network Block Device (NBD) server with stable plugin ABI
and permissive license. libnbd is an NBD client library.
I'm pleased to announce the latest stable releases of both projects:
nbdkit 1.28.0 and libnbd 1.10.0. You can download both from the
download directories here:
https://download.libguestfs.org/nbdkit/
https://download.libguestfs.org/libnbd/
Release notes are online here and attached below:
https://libguestfs.org/nbdkit-release-notes-1.28.1.html
https://libguestfs.org/libnbd-release-notes-1.10.1.html
Rich.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
These are the release notes for nbdkit stable release 1.28. This
describes the major changes since 1.26.
nbdkit 1.28.0 was released on 23 September 2021.
Security
CVE-2021-3716 reset structured replies on starttls
nbdkit was vulnerable to injected plaintext when upgrading to a secure
connection. For the full announcement see
https://www.redhat.com/archives/libguestfs/2021-August/msg00083.html
(Eric Blake).
All past security issues and information about how to report new ones
can be found in nbdkit-security(1).
Plugins
nbdkit-data-plugin(1) has new "le<NN>:" and "be<NN>:" prefixes for
little and big endian words. Also the plugin tries much harder to
optimize expressions. The test suite has been greatly expanded to
catch potential regressions.
nbdkit-floppy-plugin(1) now allows you to reserve free space (Nolan
Leake).
nbdkit-ssh-plugin(1) no longer references SHA1 host keys as part of the
effort to remove insecure algorithms (Daniel Berrangé).
nbdkit-vddk-plugin(1) reports "can_flush" and "can_fua" based on what
the version of VDDK supports. New debug flag -D vddk.stats=1 prints
the amount of time spent in VDDK calls on exit which can be useful for
profiling performance.
Filters
nbdkit-cow-filter(1) and nbdkit-cache-filter(1) no longer break up
large read requests into page-sized requests. In addition the default
block size for both filters is now 64K. Both changes greatly improve
performance.
nbdkit-cache-filter(1) has a new "cache-on-read=/PATH" parameter
allowing callers to enable and disable the cache-on-read feature at
runtime. Also there is a new "cache-min-block-size" parameter letting
you select the block size at runtime (thanks Martin Kletzander).
nbdkit-cow-filter(1) has a new "cow-on-read" parameter which works
similarly to the corresponding cache filter feature. The new
"cow-block-size" parameter lets you select the block size at runtime.
nbdkit-cow-filter(1) has less verbose debugging. To restore the old
debug output use -D cow.verbose=1
nbdkit-delay-filter(1) has new "delay-open" and "delay-close"
parameters to inject delays when clients connect and disconnect. Delay
filter parameters are now parsed more accurately (thanks Ming Xie).
Language bindings
The OCaml bindings now call "caml_shutdown" when unloading the plugin.
This causes "Stdlib.at_exit" handlers to run correctly, closes file
descriptors, releases dependent shared libraries and frees memory.
Valgrind on OCaml plugins should not show any false positives about
leaked memory.
OCaml and Python bindings may now use the ".cleanup" method.
References to Python 2 in nbdkit-python-plugin(3) have been removed.
Server
Fix captive nbdkit $uri variable so when TLS is used the URI is
constructed with the "nbds:" prefix. Additionally add a new variable
$tls which can be used by the subprocess to tell if TLS is enabled.
Debug messages are now printed atomically. This means that debug
messages are no longer broken up across multiple lines if there are
other processes writing to stderr at the same time (which often
happened when using captive nbdkit).
Enhanced valgrind support (./configure --enable-valgrind) can now be
enabled safely and with no performance impact even in production builds
(Eric Blake).
API
Plugins or filters using "nbdkit_nanosleep" now don't hang if the
client closes the socket abruptly (thanks Ming Xie).
Bug fixes
nbdkit-data-plugin(1) and nbdkit-memory-plugin(1) using
allocator=malloc no longer crash because of memory corruption in some
corner cases (only seen on s390x, but could happen on other
architectures). Meanwhile "allocator=zstd" no longer crashes when
zeroing unallocated space.
Tests
Tests now use the new "GLIBC_TUNABLES" feature, replacing
"MALLOC_CHECK_" on glibc ≥ 2.34 (thanks Eric Blake, Siddhesh
Poyarekar).
Build
configure.ac now uses spaces consistently, and has been modernized to
support the latest autotools (Eric Blake).
podwrapper.pl has been unified (almost) with the copy in libnbd.
Continue fuzzing using AFL++. Updated the fuzzing documentation.
AUTHORS
Authors of nbdkit 1.28:
Daniel P. Berrangé
Eric Blake
Martin Kletzander
Nolan Leake
Richard W.M. Jones
----------------------------------------------------------------------
These are the release notes for libnbd stable release 1.10. This
describes the major changes since 1.8.
libnbd 1.10.0 was released on 23 September 2021.
Security
There were no security bugs found in libnbd during this release cycle.
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).
New APIs
No new APIs were added in 1.10.
Enhancements to existing APIs
nbd_get_uri(3) no longer returns service names (eg.
"nbd://localhost:nbd"). Instead it always returns raw port numbers for
portability.
nbd_connect_uri(3) now supports "tls-certificates=DIR" query parameter,
making it much easier to connect to servers using TLS with X.509
certificates. Also error messages from this API have been improved in
the case of some common URI user errors.
Python "nbd.aio_connect" implements support for "AF_UNIX" sockets.
Fix invalid use of "unsafe.Pointer" in Go bindings.
Tools
nbdcopy(1) now uses a default request size of 2M (instead of 32M).
This default performs better in most cases.
nbdinfo(1) has a new --map --totals mode which displays a summary of
the map. Also new --can and --is options let you test export
properties (eg. --is read-only).
nbdinfo(1) --map option uses "data" instead of "allocated" because of
ambiguity about what "allocated" means (Eric Blake, Nir Soffer).
nbdinfo(1) shows the export size in both bytes and human units (like
"1K"). The machine-parsable JSON output has not changed.
nbdfuse(1) now supports efficient zeroing. Note this requires Linux
kernel ≥ 5.14.
nbdsh(1) has new option -n which avoids creating the implicit handle
"h". Also new option -v which enables debugging. Also the initial
help banner is now context sensitive giving more relevant information
depending on how nbdsh was invoked.
Tests
CI tests were greatly enhanced and many platform-specific fixes were
made. To view the latest CI tests and results see:
https://gitlab.com/nbdkit/libnbd/-/pipelines (Martin Kletzander).
Tests now use the new "GLIBC_TUNABLES" feature, replacing
"MALLOC_CHECK_" on glibc ≥ 2.34 (thanks Eric Blake, Siddhesh
Poyarekar).
Other improvements and bug fixes
The nbdcopy(1) progress bar should be displayed more accurately in
multithreaded mode.
Documentation
nbd_connect(3) and nbd_aio_connect(3) documentation has been revised
and improved.
More consistent option styling is used throughout the documentation.
podwrapper.pl has been unified (almost) with the copy in nbdkit.
Build
configure.ac now uses spaces consistently, and has been modernized to
support the latest autotools (Eric Blake).
We now warn about large stack frames, and a few places which used large
stack frames have been fixed.
Continue fuzzing using AFL++. Updated the fuzzing documentation.
Fix building from git with --disable-ocaml. As long as only "ocamlc"
is installed, the generator should still be built and run (Martin
Kletzander).
AUTHORS
Anson Lo
Eric Blake
Martin Kletzander
Richard W.M. Jones
--
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
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