First release candidate of PowerDNS DNSdist 1.9.0

We are excited to release the first release candidate of what will become PowerDNS DNSdist 1.9.0!

The latest addition to DNSdist is AF_XDP support. AF_XDP is a Linux feature optimized for high performance packet processing, allowing DNSdist to process UDP datagrams even faster than it already was. To give you a concrete example, on an Intel E3-1270 with 4 cores (8 threads) running at 3.8 Ghz, with a 10 Gbps Intel 82599 network card, DNSdist can reply with a static answer at 1 million UDP queries per second without AF_XDP, and around 2.5 millions with it. Of course this comes with some limitations, requires a recent Linux kernel and support in the network device driver. Please refer to our documentation to know more.

In addition to this new feature, our DNS over QUIC and DNS over HTTP3 implementations have been significantly improved and several bugs fixed. We are particularly thankful to Denis Machard for testing and reporting issues with dnstap and protobuf exports, Håkan Lindqvist for tirelessly tracking issues in our DNS over HTTP3 feature, Oto Šťáva from the Knot Resolver team for testing DNSdist against his DNS over QUIC implementation in DNS Shotgun and reporting several discrepancies!

Please see the DNSdist website for the more complete changelog and the current documentation.

Please send us all feedback and issues you might have via the mailing list, or in case of a bug, via GitHub.

We are grateful to the PowerDNS community for the reporting of bugs, issues, feature requests, and especially to the submitters of fixes and implementations of features.

The release tarball and its signature are available on the downloads website, and packages for several distributions are available from our repository.