[Pdns-announce] First alpha release of PowerDNS DNSdist 2.1.0

Remi Gacogne remi.gacogne at powerdns.com
Thu Jan 29 10:28:54 UTC 2026


Hello!

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 system 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 [1] for the more complete changelog [2] 
and the current documentation. The upgrade guide is also available there 
[3].

Please send us all feedback and issues you might have via the mailing 
list, or in case of a bug, via GitHub [4].

The release tarball [5] and its signature [6] are available on the 
downloads website, and packages for several distributions are available 
from our repository [7].

[1]: https://dnsdist.org
[2]: https://dnsdist.org/changelog.html#change-2.1.0-alpha1
[3]: https://dnsdist.org/upgrade_guide.html
[4]: https://github.com/PowerDNS/pdns/issues/new/choose
[5]:
https://downloads.powerdns.com/releases/dnsdist-2.1.0-alpha1.tar.xz
[6]:
https://downloads.powerdns.com/releases/dnsdist-2.1.0-alpha1.tar.xz.sig
[7]: https://repo.powerdns.com

Best regards,
-- 
Remi Gacogne
PowerDNS.COM BV - https://www.powerdns.com/
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