Changes in Varnish 7.2¶
For information about updating your current Varnish deployment to the new version, see Upgrading to Varnish 7.2.
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¶
Extensions¶
From the very first days of Varnish, we have been talking about having an extension points for “more advanced stuff” and we did, by and large, keep a place ready for it in the overall architecture.
Now a credible use-case finally appeared, and we have implemented “Varnish Extensions” (VTLA: “VEXT”), which can both be used to load ambient VMODs and to implement entirely new functionality, for instance stevedores.
See VEXT - Varnish Extensions in the reference manual for more information.
Parameters¶
Duration values (with a unit in seconds) can optionally take a duration
unit with the same syntax as VCL. For example, the default values of
default_ttl, default_grace and default_keep were changed
respectively from 120.000, 10.000 and 0.000 to 2m, 10s
and 0s.
The platform-dependent tcp_keepalive_time parameter is supported on
macOS.
The new vcc_feature bits parameter replaces previous vcc_* boolean
parameters. The latter still exist as deprecated aliases.
Other changes in varnishd¶
The metadata VMODs exposes to Varnishd has changed to a non-binary
format, and it is incompatible with all previous releases.
That makes it possible for the VCC (compilation) process to avoid
opening the VMODs with dlopen(3), which is both faster and
safer.
Background fetch tasks are no longer queued as this could result in slow grace hits subject to indefinite delays when thread pools are saturated.
Changes to VCL¶
VCL variables¶
ESI sub-requests can no longer inherit a req.http.transfer-encoding
header since the request body is strictly handled by the top request.
The resp.http.via header generated by Varnish uses server.identity
which defaults to the host name. A req.http.via header is generated
also before entering vcl_recv. If a client request or backend response
already had a Via header, it is now appended to instead of overwritten.
A resp.http.via header is no longer overwritten by varnish, but
rather appended to.
The server.identity variable is guaranteed to be a single token as
defined in the HTTP grammar, to safely be used as either a host name or
pseudonym in Via headers.
The now variable remains constant in a VCL subroutine. This was already
the case, but is now (pun intended) formally defined behavior. It keeps the
same value even if the execution blocks for a significant time, for example
while calling a VMOD function.
Bundled VMODs¶
For a real time timestamp, the function std.now() can be used instead.
There is also a new std.timed_call() to measure the execution time of a
subroutine.
Cookie headers generated by vmod_cookie no longer have a spurious trailing
semi-colon (';') at the end of the string.
varnishlog¶
The Begin log records may contain a 4th field with the sub-level of
sub-tasks. The Begin[4] field is used by the -E option (or lack
thereof) in log utilities to include sub-tasks or not. Internally, only ESI
tasks are subject to this filtering, but it can apply to tasks spawned by
VMODs too.
Similarly, the Link record has the same optional 4th field.
The -k option from varnishlog is now available in varnishncsa.
varnishstat¶
The unused counter MAIN.fetch_no_thread was repurposed and renamed to
MAIN.bgfetch_no_thread to signal when background fetch tasks fail to
be scheduled because thread pools are saturated.
To help estimate the rate of vsl_space consumption, the new counter
MAIN.shm_bytes was added. It offers a finer-grained metric than the
existing MAIN.shm_cycles that depends on the vsl_space setting.
A new contribution script called varnishstatdiff can be used to compare
the output of two varnishstat -1 executions with a friendly diff format
for varnishstat’s specific output.
varnishtest¶
New macros ${pkg_version} and ${pkg_branch} expanding respectively
to 7.2.0 and 7.2 for the current release.
It is possible to match the text on screen against a regular expression
with the new process -match command.
The new filewrite [-a] command can put or append text into a file.
A Varnish instance name in a VTC is used by default as the server identity for predictable Via headers.
For example:
varnish v1 -vcl+backend { ... }
The expected Via header is:
Via: 1.1 v1 (Varnish/7.2)
The instance name can still be set to a different value using the -arg
command to change the varnishd -i option.