Changes in Varnish 7.4

For information about updating your current Varnish deployment to the new version, see Upgrading to Varnish 7.4.

A more detailed and technical account of changes in Varnish, with links to issues that have been fixed and pull requests that have been merged, may be found in the change log.

varnishd

HTTP/2 header field validation is now more strict with respect to allowed characters.

The VCL-steps manual page has been added to document the VCL state machines.

VCL Tracing

VCL tracing now needs to be explicitly activated by setting the req.trace or bereq.trace VCL variables, which are initialized from the feature +trace flag. Only if the trace variables are set will VCL_trace log records be generated.

Consequently, VCL_trace has been removed from the default vsl_mask, so any trace records will be emitted by default. vsl_mask can still be used to filter VCL_trace records.

To trace vcl_init {} and vcl_fini {}, set the feature +trace flag while the vcl is loaded/discarded.

Parameters

The startup_timeout parameter now specifically replaces cli_timeout for the initial startup only.

Changes to VCL

The Content-Length and Transfer-Encoding headers are now protected. For the common use case of unset (be)req.http.Content-Length to dismiss a body, unset (be)req.body should be used.

varnishlog

Object creation failures by the selected storage engine are now logged under the Error tag as Failed to create object object from %s %s.

varnishadm

Tabulation of the vcl.list CLI output has been modified slightly.

varnishstat

The counter MAIN.http1_iovs_flush has been added to track the number of premature writev() calls due to an insufficient number of IO vectors. This number is configured through the http1_iovs parameter for client connections and implicitly defined by the amount of free workspace for backend connections.

varnishtest

The basename of the test directory is now available as the vtcid macro to serve as a unique string across concurrently running tests.

The varnishd_args_prepend and varnishd_args_append macros have been added to allow addition of arguments to varnishd invocations before and after those added by varnishtest by default.

User-Agent request and Server response headers are now created by default, containing the respective client and server name. The txreq -nouseragent and txresp -noserver options disable addition of these headers.

Changes for developers and VMOD authors

Call sites of VMOD functions and methods can now be restricted to built-in subroutines using the $Restrict stanza in the VCC file.

.vcc files of VMODs are now installed to /usr/share/varnish/vcc (or equivalent) to enable re-use by other tools like code editors.

API Changes

The varnishapi version has been increased to 3.1 and the VSHA256_*, VENC_Encode_Base64() and VENC_Decode_Base64() functions are now exposed.

In struct vsmwseg and struct vsm_fantom, the class member has been renamed to category.

The VSB_quote_pfx() (and, consequently, VSB_quote()) function no longer produces \v for a vertical tab. This improves compatibility with JSON.

Additions to varnish C header files

The PTOK() macro has been added to vas.h to simplify error checking of pthread_* POSIX functions.

The v_cold macro has been added to add __attribute__((cold)) on compilers supporting it. It is used for VRT_fail() to mark failure code paths as cold.

The utility macros ALLOC_OBJ_EXTRA() and ALLOC_FLEX_OBJ() have been added to miniobj.h to simplify allocation of objects larger than a struct and such with a flexible array.

eof