nbdkit-release-notes-1.6(1)

NAME
nbdkit-release-notes-1.6 - release notes for nbdkit 1.6

DESCRIPTION
These are the release notes for nbdkit stable release 1.6. This describes the major changes since 1.4.

nbdkit 1.6.0 was released on 28th August 2018.

  New features

•   You can now write plugins in the Lua scripting language, see nbdkit-lua-plugin(3).

•   nbdkit and common plugins are now "63 bit clean": the maximum disk size supported is 2⁶³-1 bytes, and the core server and plugins now have additional tests to check this works, even on 32 bit machines.

•   Multiple improvements to the nbdkit-file-plugin(1) to make zeroing and trimming perform better, work correctly with block devices, and work on older Linux kernels [Nir Soffer, Eric Blake].

•   New nbdkit-pattern-plugin(1) generates a simple, fixed test pattern for testing nbdkit filters and NBD clients.

•   New nbdkit-truncate-filter(1) can: truncate or extend the size of plugins, or round up or down the size to next multiple of a power of 2. Useful for NBD clients like qemu which can only handle NBD sizes which are a multiple of 512 bytes.

•   New nbdkit-error-filter(1) which can be used to inject errors into the protocol for testing how clients can handle and recover from errors.

•   New nbdkit-data-plugin(1) allows you to specify (small) disk images directly on the command line.

•   Enhanced error reporting in the Python plugin so full tracebacks from errors are now displayed instead of being lost as before.

•   "NBD_OPT_GO" now supported, so we can return errors when negotiating the export name.

•   Support for logging error messages to syslog.

•   nbdkit can now be compiled with Clang (as well as GCC).

•   nbdkit can now be compiled on FreeBSD.

•   nbdkit-vddk-plugin(1) is compiled unconditionally. You no longer need to install the proprietary VDDK to compile it.

•   Debug messages now include the name of the filter when invoked from a filter context.

•   Debug flags (-D option) provides lightweight debugging for plugin authors.

  Acknowledgements
Thanks to all who contributed, especially Nir Soffer and Eric Blake.

SEE ALSO
nbdkit(1), https://www.redhat.com/archives/libguestfs/2018-August/msg00279.html.

AUTHORS
Eric Blake

Richard W.M. Jones

COPYRIGHT
Copyright Red Hat

LICENSE
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