[Pdns-users] First release candidate for PowerDNS DNSdist 2.1.0

[Remi Gacogne]

Hello!

Today we released the first release candidate for PowerDNS DNSdist 2.1.0.

This new version brings a lot of bug fixes since the second beta, 
including security issues that have been recently fixed in stable 
branches[1][2]. We also tracked and fixed a performance regression, 
making the performance of this release candidate better than previous 
releases, especially for cache hits.

Compared to 2.0, 2.1 also brings the following 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)
- Add prepend and append methods to Lua DNSName
- Export DNS flags via ProtoBuf
- Add actions, methods and FFI functions to unset a tag
- Implement "allowed rcodes/total" ratio dynamic rule
- Subnets excluded from dynamic rules should not count towards thresholds
- Add a Lua callback to validate health-check responses

Please be aware that DNSdist now looks by default for a configuration 
file named "dnsdist.yml" in the systemd 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 [3] for the more complete changelog [4] 
and the current documentation. The upgrade guide is also available there 
[5].

Please send us all feedback and issues you might have via the mailing 
list, or in case of a bug, via GitHub [6].

The release tarball [7] and its signature [8] are available on the 
downloads website, and packages for several distributions are available 
from our repository [9].

[1]: 
https://www.dnsdist.org/security-advisories/powerdns-advisory-for-dnsdist-2026-02.html
[2]: 
https://www.dnsdist.org/security-advisories/powerdns-advisory-for-dnsdist-2026-04.html
[1]: https://dnsdist.org
[2]: https://dnsdist.org/changelog.html#change-2.1.0-rc1
[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-rc1.tar.xz
[6]:
https://downloads.powerdns.com/releases/dnsdist-2.1.0-rc1.tar.xz.sig
[7]: https://repo.powerdns.com

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