NSD 4.10.0 released

Today, we released version 4.10.0 of the authoritative DNS nameserver NSD.

Version 4.10.0 integrates simdzone and drops the Flex+Bison zone parser.

NSD used a Flex+Bison based zone parser since version 1.4.0. The parser served NSD well, but zones have increased in size and zone loading performance has been problematic for some users.

With the integration of simdzone (https://github.com/NLnetLabs/simdzone), performance of loading zones and IXFRs is drastically improved. Quick measurements show improvements ranging anywhere from 3.8x to 1.6x, depending on zone size and database type, though the improvements will be less noticable for NSEC3 zones due to pre-hashing.

simdzone leverages SIMD instructions in modern CPUs to improve throughput. Right now SSE4.2 and AVX2 instruction sets are supported, other instruction sets will use the fallback implementation, which still is a decent improvement over the Flex+Bison based parser.

The release has additional fixes from the release candidate. The parse of lowercase type names is fixed and the x86_64 variable is set to no for other machines.

You can get source packages of this version from the downloads page.