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.