NBD — Network Block Device — is a protocol for accessing Block Devices (hard disks and disk-like things) over a Network. nbdkit is a toolkit for creating NBD servers. The key features are: * Multithreaded NBD server written in C with good performance. * Minimal dependencies for the basic server. * Liberal license (BSD) allows nbdkit to be linked to proprietary libraries or included in proprietary code. * Well-documented, simple plugin API with a stable ABI guarantee. Lets you export “unconventional” block devices easily. * You can write plugins in C, Lua, Perl, Python, OCaml, Ruby, shell script or Tcl. * Filters can be stacked in front of plugins to transform the output. For documentation, see the ‘docs/’ directory. For plugins, examples and filters, see the ‘plugins/’ and ‘filters/’ directories. LICENSE ======= This software is copyright (C) Red Hat Inc. and licensed under a BSD license. See ‘LICENSE’ for details. BUILDING FROM SOURCE ==================== Requirements ------------ To build the basic server and some plugins nbdkit needs nothing except Linux or FreeBSD, and: - GCC or Clang - bash - GNU make Although it is possible to build without it, it’s recommended to enable TLS (authentication and encryption) support for which you will need: - gnutls >= 3.3.0 Optional dependencies --------------------- To build the man pages, you will optionally need to install: - Perl - Pod::Man and Pod::Simple (Perl library) For the gzip plugin: - zlib For the xz plugin: - liblzma For the curl (HTTP/FTP) plugin: - libcurl For the iso plugin: - genisoimage or mkisofs For the floppy plugin: - iconv (on Linux this is built into glibc, on other systems it may be a separate library) For the libvirt plugin: - libvirt For the libguestfs plugin, and to run parts of the test suite: - libguestfs - guestfish (from libguestfs) For the ext2 plugin: - ext2fs - com_err For the Perl, example4 and tar plugins: - perl interpreter - perl development libraries - perl module ExtUtils::Embed For the Python plugin: - python interpreter (either version 2 or 3 may be used) - python development libraries For the OCaml plugin: - OCaml >= 4.02.2 For the Tcl plugin: - Tcl development library and headers For the Lua plugin: - Lua development library and headers For bash tab completion: - bash-completion >= 1.99 To test for memory leaks (‘make check-valgrind’): - valgrind program and development headers For non-essential enhancements to the test suite: - losetup (from util-linux package) - qemu-io (usually shipped with qemu) - socat - ss (from iproute package) Building -------- To build from tarball: To build from git: ---------------------- ------------------ autoreconf -i ./configure ./configure make make make check make check To run nbdkit from the source directory, use the top level ./nbdkit script. It will run nbdkit and plugins from the locally compiled directory: $ ./nbdkit example1 -f -v ./src/nbdkit ./plugins/example1/.libs/nbdkit-example1-plugin.so -f -v [etc] Optionally run this command as root to install everything: make install Python ------ By default nbdkit uses the Python version of the Python interpreter called “python” on the current $PATH. To use another version of Python you may need to set the PYTHON variable when configuring. For example: ./configure PYTHON=/usr/bin/python3 Running the tests ----------------- You will need to install libguestfs to run most of the test suite: make check The test suite is fairly comprehensive. It runs the newly built nbdkit + plugins as a captive process, and tests them using libguestfs. If there is a failure, look at the corresponding ‘tests/*.log’ file for debug information. A few tests require root privileges, and are skipped by default. To run them you must do: sudo make check-root DOWNLOAD TARBALLS ================= Tarballs are available from: http://libguestfs.org/download/nbdkit DEVELOPERS ========== Install the valgrind program and development headers. Use: ./configure --enable-gcc-warnings --enable-valgrind When testing use: make check make check-valgrind For development ideas, see the TODO file. The upstream git repository is: https://github.com/libguestfs/nbdkit Please send patches to the libguestfs mailing list: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/libguestfs For further information, see: http://libguestfs.org/ https://github.com/NetworkBlockDevice/nbd/blob/master/doc/proto.md