nbdkit 1.24, new data plugin features

nbdkit 1.24 was released on Thursday. It’s our flexible, fast network block device with loads of features. nbdkit-data-plugin, a plugin that lets you create test patterns from the command line gained some interesting new functionality:

$ nbdkit data ' ( 0x55 0xAA )*2048 '

This command worked before as a way to create a repeating test pattern in a disk image. A new feature is you can write a shell script snippet to generate the pattern instead:

$ nbdkit data ' <( while :; do printf "%04x" $((i++)); done ) [:2048] '

This command will create a pattern of characters “0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 2 0 0 0 3 …” (truncated to 2048 bytes). We could turn that into a block device and display the contents:

# nbd-client localhost /dev/nbd0
# blockdev --getsize64 /dev/nbd0
2048
# dd if=/dev/nbd0 | hexdump -C | head
4+0 records in
4+0 records out
2048 bytes (2.0 kB, 2.0 KiB) copied, 0.000167082 s, 12.3 MB/s
00000000  30 30 30 30 30 30 30 31  30 30 30 32 30 30 30 33  |0000000100020003|
00000010  30 30 30 34 30 30 30 35  30 30 30 36 30 30 30 37  |0004000500060007|
00000020  30 30 30 38 30 30 30 39  30 30 30 61 30 30 30 62  |00080009000a000b|
00000030  30 30 30 63 30 30 30 64  30 30 30 65 30 30 30 66  |000c000d000e000f|
00000040  30 30 31 30 30 30 31 31  30 30 31 32 30 30 31 33  |0010001100120013|
00000050  30 30 31 34 30 30 31 35  30 30 31 36 30 30 31 37  |0014001500160017|
00000060  30 30 31 38 30 30 31 39  30 30 31 61 30 30 31 62  |00180019001a001b|
00000070  30 30 31 63 30 30 31 64  30 30 31 65 30 30 31 66  |001c001d001e001f|
00000080  30 30 32 30 30 30 32 31  30 30 32 32 30 30 32 33  |0020002100220023|
00000090  30 30 32 34 30 30 32 35  30 30 32 36 30 30 32 37  |0024002500260027|
# nbd-client -d /dev/nbd0
# killall nbdkit

The data plugin also lets you read from files which is useful for making disks with random initial data. For example here’s how to create a disk with 16 identical sectors of random data (notice how /dev/random is read in, truncated to 512 bytes, and then 16 copies are made):

$ nbdkit data ' </dev/urandom[:512]*16 '

The plugin can also create sparse disks. You can do this just by moving the current offset using “@”:

$ nbdkit data ' @32768 1 ' --run 'nbdinfo --map "$uri"'
     0       32768    3  hole,zero
 32768           1    0  allocated

We use this plugin quite extensively when testing libnbd.