PowerDNS Blog

PowerDNS DNSdist 2.1.0-alpha1 Released

Written by Remi Gacogne | Jan 29, 2026 10:25:40 AM

Today we released the first alpha version of what will become PowerDNS DNSdist 2.1.0.

This new version brings many new features:

  • OpenTelemetry tracing support has been added

  • Structured logging has been added
  • A and AAAA records can now be shuffled in the packet cache (Karel Bilek)
  • Lua parsers are now available for A, AAAA and CNAME records (Ensar Sarajčić)
  • a Lua hook can now be invoked on server state changes (@pacnal)

It also contains many performance improvements:

  • Load-balancing policies are more efficient

  • Server selection using the load-balancing policy is now delayed until after the cache lookup has been done
  • Holger Hoffstätte improved the "roundrobin" load-balancing policy
  • AF_XDP / XSK packages are now reused more efficiently
  • IPCrypt2 PFX support has been added, to preserve network prefix relationships in encrypted output
  • The in-memory ring buffers now support sampling to be able to retain data for a longer time period without keeping too many entries in memory

 

Please be aware that DNSdist now looks by default for a configuration file named "dnsdist.yml" in the systemd configuration directory, instead of "dnsdist.conf". It will however fall back for a "dnsdist.conf" file if there is no "dnsdist.yml" file, so existing configurations should still work as expected.

Other notable changes are the removal of DNS over HTTPS support via the h2o library, meaning DNS over HTTPS is now only available via the nghttp2 library.

As this release introduces major changes, we invite everyone to test it as soon as possible to make sure that all existing use cases are still working properly, and that there is no performance degradation.

Please see the DNSdist website for the 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.

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