nbdkit for macOS

nbdkit, our high performance, portable Network Block Device server has now been ported to macOS. It’s a command line tool and macOS is sufficiently FreeBSD-like that the port wasn’t very hard. It’s relatively full featured, including a large portion of the plugins and filters, a brand new exit-with-parent implementation, and almost all tests passing.

However one larger problem remains (for performance) which is the lack of atomic CLOEXEC when opening pipes or sockets. Linux has pipe2 and accept4. I wasn’t able to find any good equivalent on macOS, and hence most of the time we are limited to serializing some requests that could otherwise run in parallel.

nbdkit already supported Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Haiku and Windows!

nbdkit FreeBSD support

With this patch series, nbdkit, the pluggable Network Block Device server, supports FreeBSD ≥ 11.2.

whenjobs 0.7.0 released

I’ve just released whenjobs 0.7.0 to fix a couple of problems that I was having myself.

Firstly, while it’s a nice feature of whenjobs that I can set variables, sometimes I don’t want jobs to be triggered as a result of setting variables. The new whenjobs --whisper command lets me set variables without reevaluating when-clauses:

$ whenjobs --whisper libguestfs_version=1.17.16

Secondly, my jobs file was getting pretty long and unmaintainable (400 lines), since I added various libguestfs branches and hivex to be managed by whenjobs. So I’ve added a feature where you can split the jobs file into multiple files:

$ ls -l .whenjobs/*.ml
-rw-rw-r--. 1 rjones rjones 3284 Mar 13 19:10 .whenjobs/jobs_hivex.ml
-rw-rw-r--. 1 rjones rjones 4039 Mar 13 19:07 .whenjobs/jobs_libguestfs.ml
-rw-rw-r--. 1 rjones rjones 3766 Mar 13 19:09 .whenjobs/jobs_libguestfs_stable.ml
-rw-rw-r--. 1 rjones rjones   45 Mar 13 19:10 .whenjobs/jobs.ml

I think I described whenjobs as a “cron replacement”. It is a cron replacement for me, for my personal use, but it’s not officially a cron replacement and this project has nothing whatsoever to do with Red Hat or Fedora. The reason I say this is I get some pretty idiotic comments like these.