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NBD client library in userspace

NBD — Network Block Device — is a protocol for accessing Block Devices (hard disks and disk-like things) over a Network. This is the NBD client library in userspace, a simple library for writing NBD clients.

The key features are:

  • Synchronous API for ease of use.
  • Asynchronous API for writing non-blocking, multithreaded clients. You can mix both APIs freely.
  • High performance.
  • Minimal dependencies for the basic library.
  • Well-documented, stable API.
  • Bindings in several programming languages.
  • Shell (nbdsh) for command line and scripting.
  • Copying tool (nbdcopy) for high performance copying and streaming.
  • Hexdump tool (nbddump) to print NBD content.
  • Query tool (nbdinfo) to query NBD servers.
  • FUSE support (nbdfuse) to mount NBD in the local filesystem.
  • Linux ublk support (nbdublk) to create the userspace block device.

For documentation, see the docs and examples subdirectories.

License

The software is Copyright Red Hat and licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License version 2 or above (LGPLv2+). See the file COPYING.LIB for details. The examples are under a very liberal license.

Building from source

To build from git:

autoreconf -i
./configure
make
make check

To build from tarball:

./configure
make
make check

To run the tests under valgrind:

make check-valgrind

To run benchmarks:

make bench

Some tests require root permissions (and are therefore risky). If you want to run these tests, do:

sudo make check-root

On FreeBSD, OpenBSD and macOS which do not have GNU make by default you must use gmake instead of make.

Requirements:

  • Linux, FreeBSD or OpenBSD. Other OSes may also work but we have only tested these three.
  • GCC or Clang
  • GNU make
  • bash

Required for building from git, optional for building from tarballs:

  • OCaml (ocamlc, the bytecode compiler) is required to generate some source files, which is needed to build from git. However ocamlc is not needed if building from the official tarballs from http://download.libguestfs.org/libnbd/ because those contain the generated files.

Recommended - if not present, some features will be disabled:

  • GnuTLS is recommended for TLS support. If not available then you will not be able to access encrypted servers and some APIs related to TLS will always return an error.
  • libxml2 is recommended for NBD URI support. If not available then a few APIs related to URIs will always return an error, and the nbdinfo tool is not built.

Optional:

  • Perl Pod::Man and Pod::Simple to generate the documentation.
  • OCaml and ocamlfind are both needed to generate the OCaml bindings.
  • Python >= 3.3 to build the Python 3 bindings and NBD shell (nbdsh).
  • FUSE 3 to build the nbdfuse program.
  • Linux >= 6.0 and ublksrv library to build nbdublk program.
  • go and cgo, for compiling the golang bindings and tests.
  • bash-completion >= 1.99 for tab completion.

Optional, only needed to run the test suite:

  • nbdkit >= 1.12, the nbdkit basic plugins and the nbdkit basic filters are recommended as they are needed to run the test suite.
  • nbdkit, nbd-server, qemu-nbd and qemu-storage-daemon if you want to do interoperability testing against these servers.
  • A C++ compiler is needed if you want to test that the library works from C++.
  • coreutils or standard Unix tools such as cmp, dd, stat, truncate.
  • libdl (dlopen, dlclose etc) to test this functionality.
  • qemu, qemu-io, qemu-img for interoperability testing.
  • certtool and psktool (part of GnuTLS) for testing TLS support.
  • valgrind if you want to run the tests under valgrind.
  • nbd-client and Linux nbd.ko for testing nbdcopy to/from devices.
  • flake8 to keep Python code formatted uniformly.
  • ss (from iproute) for TCP-based tests.
  • "sudo modprobe vsock_loopback" to run tests of AF_VSOCK (Linux-only).

Optional, only needed to run some examples:

  • glib2 for examples that interoperate with the glib main loop.
  • libev for examples that interoperate with the libev library.

Download tarballs

Tarballs are available from: http://libguestfs.org/download/libnbd

Developers

Install the valgrind program and development headers.

Use:

./configure --enable-gcc-warnings --enable-python-code-style

When testing use:

make check
make check-valgrind

Use the following one-time setup for nicer diffs of various files:

git config diff.ml.xfuncname '^(type|and|val|let) .*='
git config diff.ml-api.xfuncname '^(let .*=|  "[^"]*", \{$)'
git config diff.mli.xfuncname '^(type|and|val|module) '
git config diff.states.xfuncname '^([a-zA-Z_].*| [A-Z._0-9]*:$)'

For development ideas, see the TODO file.

The upstream git repository is: https://gitlab.com/nbdkit/libnbd

Patches are accepted either by email to the upstream mailing list: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/libguestfs or by Merge Request on gitlab.com

If you want to fuzz the library see fuzzing/README.

Other links