Security

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).

There was one security bug found in libnbd during this release cycle.

CVE-2021-20286 denial of service when using nbd_set_opt_mode(3)

See the full announcement here: https://listman.redhat.com/archives/libguestfs/2021-March/msg00092.html (Found and fixed by Eric Blake).

New APIs

nbd_get_private_data(3)

nbd_set_private_data(3)

These calls allow you to store either an unsigned integer or a pointer in the handle for the application to use for its own purposes.

nbd_get_uri(3)

This call constructs an NBD URI which can be used to connect back to the same server (using nbd_connect_uri(3) or from other tools that support the NBD URI standard).

Enhancements to existing APIs

Numeric IPv6 URIs (like "nbd://[::1]/") are now supported.

libnbd gives a better error message if the server backlog overflows (thanks Xin Long, Lukas Doktor, Eric Blake, Martin Kletzander).

New features

Continuous integration (CI) tests now run on every commit and merge request to the upstream repository (Martin Kletzander).

Tools

A great deal of work has been done to improve the performance of nbdcopy(1) (Nir Soffer, Eric Blake).

On Linux, nbdcopy now uses readahead when reading from files, and takes steps to preserve the host page cache.

nbdcopy new --request-size option to allow controlling the size of requests made to NBD servers. Adjusting this can affect performance (Nir Soffer).

nbdcopy now supports "null:" pseudo-target, where it discards the output. This is useful for benchmarking.

nbdcopy new -v flag to enable libnbd and other debugging.

nbdinfo(1) --list (which lists all exports of a server) no longer exits early if one of the exports is inaccessible or there is a recoverable error (Eric Blake).

nbdinfo now prints the URI of each export in the output making it easier to connect back to each export.

nbdfuse(1) is now multithreaded and supports issuing parallel NBD commands on a single connection as well as multi-conn, and other enhancements have been made. This resulted in around 50% performance improvement when tested with fio.

nbdfuse now supports nbdcopy-style "[ CMD ]", eg:
nbdfuse dir/ramdisk [ nbdkit memory 1G ]

nbdfuse now supports trimming. Also it supports fast zeroing, but this requires a forthcoming kernel patch before it will work.

nbdfuse sets the virtual file permissions appropriately if the NBD export is read-only.

nbdfuse new -v flag to enable libnbd and other debugging.

Tests

Added a test of interoperability with qemu-storage-daemon(1). Note that qemu-storage-daemon was broken in qemu 6.0.0 so this test can fail unless you update to a fixed version (thanks Stefan Hajnoczi, Daniel Berrangé).

Added a test of nbdcopy with TLS which was previously untested.

Python code style tests are now opt-in using
./configure --enable-python-code-style

More tests should now run on FreeBSD and not be skipped.

nbdfuse tests now ensure that errors from NBD are transmitted through FUSE back to the local client.

"MALLOC_CHECK_" and "MALLOC_PERTURB_" are only enabled when running the tests, not when running libnbd programs from the build directory. This makes it easier to do benchmarks.

Other improvements and bug fixes

The minimum C compiler is now ISO C99 (previously ANSI C90).

FUSE 3 (instead of FUSE 2) is now required to build nbdfuse.

The library tries harder not to leak thread-local storage memory on dlclose or exit. (Because of the design of Linux it is not always possible to avoid this, especially in multithreaded programs.)

Fix the progress bar in nbdcopy(1).

UTF-8 export names are now processed and displayed properly by nbdinfo(1).

The --help output of nbdcopy, nbdfuse and nbdinfo now displays a brief summary of all options and has some examples.

The generator now only requires ocamlc, not ocamlfind (Abhay Raj Singh).

Golang bindings now use and require golang modules.

Documentation

Document using libnbd with the Meson build system.

Added Python examples.

Add example of how to integrate libnbd with libev (Nir Soffer).