=head1 NAME

nbdkit-release-notes-1.12 - release notes for nbdkit 1.12

=head1 DESCRIPTION

These are the release notes for nbdkit stable release 1.12.
This describes the major changes since 1.10.

nbdkit 1.12.0 was released on 10th April 2019.

=head2 New features

New L<nbdkit-ssh-plugin(1)> which lets you turn any disk image on a
remote Unix server accessible by ssh into an NBD source.

New L<nbdkit-rate-filter(1)> for bandwidth-limiting connections.
Either single connections or the whole server can be
bandwidth-limited, and the limit can be dynamically changed at
runtime.

New L<nbdkit-readahead-filter(1)> improves performance when reading
sequentially from plugins with a high request overhead like curl.

New L<nbdkit-linuxdisk-plugin(1)> lets you create complete ext2, ext3
or ext4 filesystems in a GPT partitioned disk image, from a local
directory.  This can be attached to existing Linux VMs or used to
create new ones from scratch.

New L<nbdkit-noextents-filter(1)> can make sparse disks appear fully
allocated.

Plugins can now be written in the Rust programming language, see
L<nbdkit-rust-plugin(3)>.

The old nbdkit-xz-plugin has been removed.  Use

 nbdkit --filter=xz file file.xz

as a replacement.  This filter can be placed on top of other plugins
such as curl (for decompressing a remote web URL).

C<NBD_CMD_BLOCK_STATUS> has been implemented allowing clients to query
which parts of the disk are allocated, holes or zeroes.  Plugins and
filters have been extended to supply this information in many cases.
This required adding minimal support for NBD protocol Structured
Replies, C<NBD_CMD_FLAG_REQ_ONE> and C<NBD_CMD_FLAG_DF>.  (Thanks to
Eric Blake for extensive help with this one.)

L<nbdkit-vddk-plugin(1)> has been updated to VDDK 6.7, but now also
works back as far as VDDK 5.1.1.  It supports extents, flush and FUA.
Also added: new flags C<single-link> and C<unbuffered>.  (Thanks to
Martin Kletzander).

The line "All rights reserved." was removed from the license, with the
agreement of all nbdkit contributors.  Note this does not change the
license.

C<nbdkit_error> errors are printed in red when writing to the
terminal, making them much easier to see.

C<nbdkit_parse_size> rejects negative values, eg.
S<C<nbdkit memory size=-100>> (Nikolay Ivanets).

L<nbdkit-curl-plugin(1)> now supports cookies, password auth and
proxies.  It can also limit URLs to whitelisted protocols.  This makes
it broadly feature equivalent to and a replacement for the qemu curl
block driver.

L<nbdkit-partitioning-plugin(1)> can now create MBR logical
partitions.  Previously it only supported 4 MBR primary partitions and
if you wanted more than that you had to use GPT.

L<nbdkit-partition-filter(1)> also supports MBR logical partitions.

L<nbdkit-python-plugin(3)> creates plugins which are compatible with
Python >= 3.7.

Tests are now run under C<MALLOC_CHECK_=1> and
C<MALLOC_PERTURB_=I<random>>.  This causes some tests to crash
(silently) because of a shutdown race which needs to be fixed.

Test shell scripts now have a generic C<requires> function to skip
tests if features are not present.

C99 type C<bool> is now used in most places where appropriate.

The protocol and connections code in the server has been split up
because the single file had grown very large.  (Thanks to Eric Blake
for helping with protocol issues).

=head1 SEE ALSO

L<nbdkit(1)>,
L<https://www.redhat.com/archives/virt-tools-list/2019-April/msg00045.html>.

=head1 AUTHORS

Eric Blake

Richard W.M. Jones

=head1 COPYRIGHT

Copyright Red Hat
