PowerDNS Recursor 5.2.0-rc1 Released

We are proud to announce the first release candidate of PowerDNS Recursor 5.2.0!

Compared to the latest 5.1 release, this pre-release deprecates the old settings file format in favor of the new YAML format. Old-style settings are only accepted if --enable-old-settings is specified on the command line.

This release also includes the following changes:

• Forward zones can now be populated using catalog zones.
• The authoritative servers to transfer RPZs or catalog zones from can now be specified by hostname.
• Lua functions to create threads running Lua code, dump and restore (parts of) the record cache and to invoke Lua hooks on startup and shutdown have been added.
• Metrics related code for the various ways to export metrics and the related documentation is now generated from a single source, providing better maintainability and consistency.
• The trust anchor of the new root zone key scheduled to be used for signing the root zone starting October 2026 has been added.
• Infrastructure to build using Meson instead of auto-tools has been introduced. We plan to make the meson build the default in a future release.
• The default maximum number of incoming TCP connections has been raised to 1024.

As always, there are also many smaller bug fixes and improvements, please refer to the changelog for additional details. When upgrading do not forget to check the upgrade guide.

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

The tarball (signature) is available from our download server and packages for several distributions are available from our repository.

Older release trains are supported for one year after the following major release. Consult the EOL policy for more details.

We would also like to mention that with the 4.5 release we stopped supporting systems using 32-bit time. This includes many 32-bit Linux platforms.

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.