Fedora 24 Update: blktap-3.0.0-7.fc24.git0.9.2

[updates at fedoraproject.org]

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Fedora Update Notification
FEDORA-2016-5c8f76d76f
2016-05-07 11:36:53.839501
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Name        : blktap
Product     : Fedora 24
Version     : 3.0.0
Release     : 7.fc24.git0.9.2
URL         : http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Blktap
Summary     : Blktap Userspace Tools + Library
Description :
The blktap userspace toolkit provides a user-level disk I/O
interface. The blktap mechanism involves a kernel driver that acts
similarly to the existing Xen/Linux blkback driver, and a set of
associated user-level libraries.  Using these tools, blktap allows
virtual block devices presented to VMs to be implemented in userspace
and to be backed by raw partitions, files, network, etc.

The key benefit of blktap is that it makes it easy and fast to write
arbitrary block backends, and that these user-level backends actually
perform very well.  Specifically:

- Metadata disk formats such as Copy-on-Write, encrypted disks, sparse
  formats and other compression features can be easily implemented.

- Accessing file-based images from userspace avoids problems related
  to flushing dirty pages which are present in the Linux loopback
  driver.  (Specifically, doing a large number of writes to an
  NFS-backed image don't result in the OOM killer going berserk.)

- Per-disk handler processes enable easier userspace policing of block
  resources, and process-granularity QoS techniques (disk scheduling
  and related tools) may be trivially applied to block devices.

- It's very easy to take advantage of userspace facilities such as
  networking libraries, compression utilities, peer-to-peer
  file-sharing systems and so on to build more complex block backends.

- Crashes are contained -- incremental development/debugging is very
  fast.

The tools mainly help to verify and correct disk corruptions.

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Update Information:

Applied a bundled patch to fix a udev warning (BZ#1229953)
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This update can be installed with the "yum" update program. Use
su -c 'yum update blktap' at the command line.
For more information, refer to "Managing Software with yum",
available at https://docs.fedoraproject.org/yum/.

All packages are signed with the Fedora Project GPG key.  More details on the
GPG keys used by the Fedora Project can be found at
https://fedoraproject.org/keys
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