These are the release notes for nbdkit stable release 1.36. This describes the major changes since 1.34.
nbdkit 1.36.0 was released on 27September2023.
Security
No security issues were identified in this release.
All past security issues and information about how to report new ones can be found in nbdkit-security(1).
Plugins
New nbdkit-ones-plugin(1) which creates a fully allocated disk containing all 0xff (all ones), or another
byte of your choice.
nbdkit-curl-plugin(1) now uses a curl "multi" interface. This enables much better performance, and also
allows the curl plugin to handle requests in parallel. The curl plugin now falls back to making a "GET"
request to get the size of the remote file for certain servers which do not support "HEAD" requests.
This plugin adds new options: "ipresolve" (force IPv4 or IPv6), "resolve" (force a particular IP
address), -Dcurl.times=1 (print detailed timing stats), and -Dcurl.verbose.ids=1 (display connection
and transfer IDs).
nbdkit-memory-plugin(1) now uses a read-write lock to protect internal structures, resulting in improved
performance for mostly read workloads.
nbdkit-data-plugin(1) now has more optimizations.
nbdkit-file-plugin(1) now supports 4k sector sizes on Windows (Brian Carnes).
Filters
New nbdkit-evil-filter(1) adds random but consistent data corruption to the underlying plugin.
New nbdkit-qcow2dec-filter(1) which can decode qcow2 files (but not write to them).
nbdkit-ip-filter(1) can now filter by client SELinux label.
nbdkit-partition-filter(1) now supports 4k sector sizes (Brian Carnes).
nbdkit-retry-request-filter(1) allows the "get_size" operation to be retried.
nbdkit-tar-filter(1) adds new "tar-limit" parameter which can be used to ensure the filter does not read
indefinite amounts of input when opening the tar file.
Filters can now append their own output to nbdkit --dump-plugin output.
Languagebindings
Rust bindings add support for "after_fork", "block_size", "nbdkit_debug", "nbdkit_is_tls",
"nbdkit_parse_size", "nbdkit_parse_bool" and "nbdkit_parse_probability". The "open" method can now
return an error; note this is not backwards compatible and requires a small source code change to Rust
plugins. (Thanks Alan Somers)
nbdkit-ocaml-plugin(3) now supports OCaml 5.
OCaml bindings add support for "nbdkit_stdio_safe", "nbdkit_is_tls", "nbdkit_peer_name" and
"nbdkit_peer_security_context".
nbdkit-perl-plugin(3) now supports Perl 5.38.
Shell script plugins (nbdkit-sh-plugin(3)) may now ignore stdin in their "pwrite" method, whereas
previously it was required to read and discard stdin along error paths (thanks Eric Blake).
Server
When using the --run option, the default is now to use a private Unix domain socket (as if -U- was
specified), whereas in nbdkit ≤ 1.34 the default was to open a TCP port. The new default reflects the
most common and safest way to use the --run option. You can find out if nbdkit has the new behaviour by
checking "nbdkit --dump-config" and looking for "run_default_socket=Unix" in the output.
Debug strings containing control codes and other non-printable characters are now escaped properly.
New flag -Dnbdkit.environ=1 can be used to dump the server environment in debug output.
API
New "nbdkit_parse_probability" function which can be used to parse probabilities in various formats, like
"10%" or "1:10".
New "nbdkit_peer_security_context" function which returns the security context (usually SELinux label) of
the client.
Bugfixes
Fix long-standing double-free in nbdkit-file-plugin(1) when the client closes the connection during
negotiation (thanks Eric Blake).
nbdkit-file-plugin now has improved error messages when you try to open a file with an empty name ("").
Documentation
Miscellaneous documentation improvements for Windows (Brian Carnes).
Fuzzing instructions updated for Clang 17, AFL++ 4.08c.
Tests
Ongoing CI maintenance and fixes (Laszlo Ersek, Eric Blake).
Many fixes in the test suite for MinGW and Wine.
Several internal consistency checks were added to the test suite, to ensure, for example, that we always
use "requires_run" when the test uses the nbdkit --run option.
Build
Optionally "zlib-ng" can be used (instead of "zlib") for faster decompression in various places.
No longer link with msvcrt on Windows.
"awk" is a build requirement. It was implicitly required before (because it is needed by the
"./configure" script generated by autoconf), but now the dependency is explicit (Eric Blake).
Internals
"podwrapper" has a new --replace parameter which makes it easier to use "AC_SUBST"-substitutions in
documentation.
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