Hi all,

After one year of intense development and almost one month of debugging,
polishing, and cross-review work trying to prevent our respective coworkers
from winning the first bug award, I'm pleased to announce that haproxy 1.8.0
is now officially released!

Since -rc4, a few last user-visible changes were brought :
  - by default the master worker exits if any of its processes dies. This
    is done so that when certain processes are dedicated to certain tasks,
    we're not left with some features not working anymore. Imagine having
    7 SSL offloaders chaining to 1 HTTP frontend, and the last one dying,
    you don't want to keep the 7 useless frontends. By quitting, we give
    a chance to a service manager to detect the problem and alert/restart
    the service. The behaviour is configurable though.

  - we were not happy with "thread-map" vs "cpu-map", making these difficult
    to configure. Now "thread-map" was removed and the feature was merged
    into "cpu-map" which also supports process ranges and cpu ranges for
    easier configuration.

  - haproxy can now be built with native systemd support using USE_SYSTEMD=1
    and starting it with -Ws (systemd-aware master-worker mode).

  - HTTP/2 will not schedule a graceful connection shutdown anymore when
    seeing a "Connection: close" header in a response. Instead a new HTTP
    action "reject" has been implemented to work like its TCP counter-part.

  - the HTTP/2 gateway code now properly reassembles split Cookie headers,
    as mandated by the specification. Not doing it was causing some issues
    with certain application servers, and absolutely needed to be addressed
    before claiming that it works.

And here is a high level overview of the new features contributed to 1.8
(warning, the list is huge) :

  - JSON stats (Simon Horman) : the stats socket's "show stat" and "show info"
    output can now be emitted in a structured JSON format which is more
    convenient than CSV for some modern data processing frameworks.

  - server templates (Frédéric Lécaille) : servers can be pre-provisionned
    in backends using a simple directive ("server-template"). It is then
    possible to configure them at runtime over the CLI or DNS, making it
    trivial to add/remove servers at run time without restarting. As a side
    effect of implementing this, all "server" keywords are now supported on
    the "default-server" line and it's possible to disable any of them using
    "no-<keyword>". All settings changed at runtime are present in the state
    file so that upon reload no information is lost.

  - dynamic cookies (Olivier Houchard) : a dynamic cookie can be generated
    on the fly based on the transport address of a newly added server. This
    is important to be able to use server templates in stateful environments.

  - per-certificate "bind" configuration (Emmanuel Hocdet) : all the SSL
    specific settings of the "bind" line may now be set per-certificate in
    the crtlist file. A common example involves requiring a client cert for
    certain domains only and not for others, all of them running on the same
    address:port.

  - pipelined and asynchronous SPOE (Christopher Faulet) : it's an important
    improvement to the Stream Processing Offload Engine that allows requests
    to be streamed over existing connections without having to wait for a
    previous response. It significantly increases the message rate and reduces
    the need for parallel connections. Two example WAFs were introduced as
    contributions to make use of this improvement (mod_security and
    mod_defender).

  - seamless reloads (Olivier Houchard) : in order to work around some issues
    faced on Linux causing a few RST to be emitted for incoming connections
    during a reload operations despite SO_REUSEPORT being used, it is now
    possible for the new haproxy process to connect to the previous one and
    to retrieve existing listening sockets so that they are never closed. Now
    no connection breakage will be observed during a reload operation anymore.

  - PCRE2 support (David Carlier) : this new version of PCRE seems to be
    making its way in some distros, so now we are compatible with it.

  - hard-stop-after (Cyril Bonté) : this new global setting forces old
    processes to quit after a delay consecutive to a soft reload operation.
    This is mostly used to avoid an accumulation of old processes in some
    environments where idle connections are kept with large timeouts.

  - support for OpenSSL asynchronous crypto engines (Grant Zhang) : this
    allows haproxy to defer the expensive crypto operations to external
    hardware engines. Not only can it significantly improve the performance,
    but it can also reduce the latency impact of slow crypto operations on
    all other operations since haproxy switches to other tasks while the
    engine is busy. This was successfully tested with Intel's QAT and with
    a home-made software engine. This requires OpenSSL 1.1.x.

  - replacement of the systemd-wrapper with a new master-worker model
    (William Lallemand) : this new model allows a master process to stay in
    the foreground on top of the multiple worker processes. This process
    knows the list of worker processes, can watch them to detect failures,
    can broadcast some signals it receives, and has access to the file
    system to reload if needed (yes, it even supports seamless upgardes to
    newer versions since it reloads using an execve() call). While initially
    designed as a replacement for the systemd-wrapper, it also proves useful
    in other environments and during development.

  - DNS autonomous resolver (Baptiste Assmann) : the DNS resolution used to
    be triggered by health checks. While easy and convenient, it was a bit
    limited and didn't allow to manage servers via the DNS, but only to detect
    address changes. With this change the DNS resolvers are now totally
    autonomous and can distribute the addresses they've received to multiple
    servers at once, and if multiple A records are present in a response, the
    advertised addresses will be optimally distributed to all the servers
    relying on the same record.

  - DNS SRV records (Olivier Houchard) : in order to go a bit further with
    DNS resolution, SRV records were implemented. The address, port and weight
    attributes will be applied to servers. New servers are automatically added
    provided there are enough available templates, and servers which disappear
    are automatically removed from the farm. By combining server templates and
    SRV records, it is now trivial to perform service discovery.

  - configurable severity output on the CLI : external tools connecting to
    haproxy's CLI had to know a lot of details about the output of certain
    actions since these messages were initially aimed at humans, and it was
    not envisionned that the socket would become a runtime API. This change
    offers an option to emit the severity level on each action's output so
    that external APIs can classify the output between success, information,
    warnings, errors etc.

  - TLS 1.3 with support for Early-Data (AKA 0-RTT) on both sides (Olivier
    Houchard) : TLS 1.3 introduces the notion of "Early-Data", which are
    data emitted during the handshake. This feature reduces the TLS handshake
    time by one round trip. When compiled with a TLS-1.3 compatible TLS
    library (OpenSSL 1.1.1-dev for now), haproxy can receive such requests,
    process them safely, and even respond before the handshake completes.
    Furthermore, when the client opts for this, it is also possible to pass
    the request to the server following the same principle. This way it is
    technically possible to fully process a client request in a single round
    trip.

  - multi-thread support (Christopher Faulet, Emeric Brun) : no more need
    to choose between having multiple independant processes performing
    their own checks or cascading two layers of processes to scale SSL.
    With multi-threading we get the best of both : a unified process state
    and multi-core scalability. Eventhough this first implementation focuses
    on stability over performance, it still scales fairly well, being almost
    linear on asymmetric crypto, which is where there's the most demand.
    This feature is enabled by default on platforms where it could be tested,
    ie Linux >= 2.6.28, Solaris, FreeBSD, OpenBSD >= 5.7. It is considered
    EXPERIMENTAL, which means that if you face a problem with it, you may
    be asked to disable it for the time it takes to solve the problem. It is
    also possible that certain fixes to come will have some side effects.

  - HTTP/2 (Willy Tarreau) : HTTP/2 is automatically detected and processed
    in HTTP frontends negociating the "h2" protocol name based on the ALPN
    or NPN TLS extensions. At the moment the HTTP/2 frames are converted to
    HTTP/1.1 requests before processing, so they will always appear as 1.1
    in the logs (and in server logs). No HTTP/2 is supported for now on the
    backend, though this is scheduled for the next steps. HTTP/2 support is
    still considered EXPERIMENTAL, so just like for multi-threading, in case
    of problem you may end up having to disable it for the time it takes to
    solve the issue.

  - small objects cache (William Lallemand) : we've been talking about this
    so-called "favicon cache" for many years now, so I'm pretty sure it will
    be welcome. To give a bit of context, we've often been criticized for
    not caching trivial responses from the servers, especially some slow
    application servers occasionally returning a small object (favicon.ico,
    main.css etc). While the obvious response is that installing a cache
    there is the best idea, it is sometimes perceived as overkill for just
    a few files. So what we've done here was to fill exactly that hole :
    have a *safe*, maintenance-free, small objects cache. In practice, if
    there is any doubt about a response's cachability, it will not cache.
    Same if the response contains a Vary header or is larger than a buffer.
    However this can bring huge benefits for situations where there's no
    argument against trivial caching. The intent is to keep it as simple and
    fast as possible so that it can always be faster than retrieving the same
    object from the next layer (possibly a full-featured cache). Note that I
    purposely asked William *not* to implement the purge on the CLI so that
    it remains maintenance-free and we don't see it abused where it should
    not be installed.

This version brings a total of 1208 commits authored by 54 persons. That's
almost the double of the number of commits of 1.7 (706) for a bit less people
(62 by then), though most of them are the same.

A few known limitations still apply to this release, but they are minor
enough to allow us to release and fix them later :
  - master-worker + daemon (-W -D) fails strangely on FreeBSD, and the
    workaround is even stranger. Since the master-worker was meant to replace
    systemd-wrapper, it's not needed on this platform so we'll take care of
    analysing the issue in depth. In the mean time, don't use -W on FreeBSD
    (nor on OpenBSD given that the issue involved the kqueue poller).

  - the CLI's "show sess" command is known for not being 100% thread-safe,
    so it's better to avoid using it if more than one thread is enabled. Note
    that it will not corrupt your system, it will most often work, but may
    either report occasional garbage or immediately crash. If it completes
    the dump you're safe. We'll work on it as well.

  - both the cache and HTTP compression use filters. It is not trivial to
    safely use them both, we still need to sort this out and either
    automatically deal with each corner case or document recommendations for
    safe use. For now, please do not enable compression with the cache (choose
    only one of them). Note that neither is enabled by default so if you don't
    know, you're safe.

  - device detection engines currently don't support multi-threading (but it's
    safe to build with it, there is a runtime check).

The outstanding amount of new features above proves that the new development
model we've adopted last year works much better than what we had in the past.
However I also noticed that it added a lot more pressure on a few person's
shoulders whose help has been invaluable in screening each and every report
so that the developers could stay focused on their tasks. And for this reason,
among the 466 persons who participated to discussions over the last year and
those animating the Discourse forums, I'd like to address special thanks to
the following ones who together responded to the vast majority of the threads
on the list, saving many of us from having to leave our code :
  - Aleksandar Lazic (aka Aleks)
  - Cyril Bonté
  - Daniel Schneller
  - Emmanuel Hocdet (aka Manu)
  - Igor Cicimov
  - Jarno Huuskonen
  - Pavlos Parissis
  - Thierry Fournier
  - Vincent Bernat

and a very special one for Lukas Tribus who in addition to providing a lot
of high quality answers on the mailing list has been tirelessly responding
to almost every question on Discourse, which is truly amazing (I'm starting
to suspect that there are several persons using the same name)! I'm totally
aware that saying "thank you" is not enough and that we'll definitely have
to see how to make your life easier as well guys, so that we can continue
to scale without adding you more burden!

I also noticed that the average quality of problem reports has significantly
increased over time, in part thanks to some long-time participants well used
to the process like Conrad Hoffmann, Pieter Baauw (aka PiBa-NL), Patrick
Hemmer, Dmitry Sivachenko or Jarno Huuskonen, and it's really great because
there's nothing more annoying than having to respond to a problem by always
starting to ask for the same information. So please keep up the good work
guys!

In my opinion we haven't emitted enough versions to make it easy for more
people to test, just like we haven't emitted enough stable releases, due to
all the people involved in the process being busy on their development. This
is something we'll have to address. I'll send a proposal of release schedule
for 1.9 some time later.

Now 1.9 opens with 1.9-dev0 so that we can go break things as usual :-)

Please find the usual URLs below :
   Site index       : http://www.haproxy.org/
   Discourse        : http://discourse.haproxy.org/
   Sources          : http://www.haproxy.org/download/1.8/src/
   Git repository   : http://git.haproxy.org/git/haproxy-1.8.git/
   Git Web browsing : http://git.haproxy.org/?p=haproxy-1.8.git
   Changelog        : http://www.haproxy.org/download/1.8/src/CHANGELOG
   Cyril's HTML doc : http://cbonte.github.io/haproxy-dconv/

By the way, I'm well known for messing up with each and every release, leaving
broken links here and there. So if something appears wrong, please report it!

Willy
---
Complete changelog from -rc5 to -final:
Christopher Faulet (15):
      MINOR: sample: Add "thread" sample fetch
      BUG/MINOR: Use crt_base instead of ca_base when crt is parsed on a server 
line
      BUG/MINOR: listener: Allow multiple "process" options on "bind" lines
      MINOR: config: Support a range to specify processes in "cpu-map" parameter
      MINOR: config: Slightly change how parse_process_number works
      MINOR: config: Export parse_process_number and use it wherever it's 
applicable
      MINOR: standard: Add my_ffsl function to get the position of the bit set 
to one
      MINOR: config: Add auto-increment feature for cpu-map
      MINOR: config: Support partial ranges in cpu-map directive
      MINOR:: config: Remove thread-map directive
      MINOR: config: Add the threads support in cpu-map directive
      MINOR: config: Add threads support for "process" option on "bind" lines
      MEDIUM: listener: Bind listeners on a thread subset if specified
      CLEANUP: debug: Use DPRINTF instead of fprintf into #ifdef 
DEBUG_FULL/#endif
      CLEANUP: log: Rename Alert/Warning in ha_alert/ha_warning

Emeric Brun (1):
      DOC: add initial peers protovol v2.0 documentation.

Emmanuel Hocdet (1):
      MINOR: ssl: Handle early data with BoringSSL

Eric Salama (2):
      CONTRIB: spoa_example: allow to compile outside HAProxy.
      CONTRIB: spoa_example: remove SPOE enums that are useless for clients

Lukas Tribus (2):
      BUG/MINOR: systemd: ignore daemon mode
      DOC: explain HTTP2 timeout behavior

Olivier Houchard (5):
      BUG/MINOR: ssl: Always start the handshake if we can't send early data.
      MINOR: ssl: Don't disable early data handling if we could not write.
      MINOR: ssl: Handle reading early data after writing better.
      MINOR: mux: Make sure every string is woken up after the handshake.
      MINOR/CLEANUP: proxy: rename "proxy" to "proxies_list"

Tim Duesterhus (1):
      MEDIUM: mworker: Add systemd `Type=notify` support

William Lallemand (17):
      BUG/MEDIUM: cache: free callback to remove from tree
      CLEANUP: cache: remove unused struct
      MEDIUM: cache: enable the HTTP analysers
      CLEANUP: cache: remove wrong comment
      CLEANUP: cache: reorder includes
      MEDIUM: shctx: use unsigned int for len and block_count
      MEDIUM: cache: "show cache" on the cli
      BUG/MEDIUM: cache: use key=0 as a condition for freeing
      BUG/MEDIUM: cache: refcount forbids to free the objects
      BUG/MEDIUM: cache fix cli_kws structure
      MEDIUM: cache: store sha1 for hashing the cache key
      BUG/MEDIUM: cache: free ressources in chn_end_analyze
      MINOR: cache: move the refcount decrease in the applet release
      MINOR: cache: replace a fprint() by an abort()
      MEDIUM: cache: max-age configuration keyword
      DOC: cache: configuration and management
      MAJOR: mworker: exits the master on failure

Willy Tarreau (49):
      BUG/MEDIUM: stream: don't automatically forward connect nor close
      BUG/MAJOR: stream: ensure analysers are always called upon close
      BUG/MINOR: stream-int: don't try to read again when CF_READ_DONTWAIT is 
set
      MINOR: threads/atomic: rename local variables in macros to avoid conflicts
      MINOR: threads/plock: rename local variables in macros to avoid conflicts
      MINOR: threads/atomic: implement pl_mb() in asm on x86
      MINOR: threads/atomic: implement pl_bts() on non-x86
      MINOR: threads/build: atomic: replace the few inlines with macros
      BUILD: threads/plock: fix a build issue on Clang without optimization
      BUILD: ebtree: don't redefine types u32/s32 in scope-aware trees
      BUILD: compiler: add a new type modifier __maybe_unused
      BUILD: h2: mark some inlined functions "unused"
      BUILD: server: check->desc always exists
      BUG/MEDIUM: h2: properly report connection errors in headers and data 
handlers
      MEDIUM: h2: add a function to emit an HTTP/1 request from a headers list
      MEDIUM: h2: change hpack_decode_headers() to only provide a list of 
headers
      BUG/MEDIUM: h2: always reassemble the Cookie request header field
      CONTRIB: spoa_example: remove bref, wordlist, cond_wordlist
      CONTRIB: spoa_example: remove last dependencies on type "sample"
      BUG/MEDIUM: deinit: correctly deinitialize the proxy and global listener 
tasks
      MINOR: pools: prepare functions to override malloc/free in pools
      MINOR: pools: implement DEBUG_UAF to detect use after free
      BUG/MEDIUM: threads/time: fix time drift correction
      BUG/MEDIUM: threads/time: maintain a common time reference between all 
threads
      BUG/MINOR: stream: fix tv_request calculation for applets
      BUG/MAJOR: h2: always remove a stream from the send list before freeing it
      BUG/MAJOR: threads/task: dequeue expired tasks under the WQ lock
      MINOR: http: implement the "http-request reject" rule
      MINOR: h2: send RST_STREAM before GOAWAY on reject
      MEDIUM: h2: don't gracefully close the connection anymore on Connection: 
close
      MINOR: h2: make use of client-fin timeout after GOAWAY
      MEDIUM: config: ensure that tune.bufsize is at least 16384 when using 
HTTP/2
      BUG/MEDIUM: stream: always release the stream-interface on abort
      CLEANUP: pools: rename all pool functions and pointers to remove this "2"
      DOC: update the roadmap file with the latest changes merged in 1.8
      DOC: fix mangled version in peers protocol documentation
      DOC: mention William as maintainer of the cache and master-worker
      DOC: add Christopher and Emeric as maintainers of the threads
      BUG/MINOR: threads: don't drop "extern" on the lock in include files
      MINOR: task: keep a pointer to the currently running task
      MINOR: task: align the rq and wq locks
      MINOR: fd: cache-align fdtab and fdcache locks
      MINOR: buffers: cache-align buffer_wq_lock
      CLEANUP: server: reorder some fields in struct server to save 40 bytes
      CLEANUP: proxy: slightly reorder the struct proxy to reduce holes
      CLEANUP: checks: remove 16 bytes of holes in struct check
      CLEANUP: cache: more efficiently pack the struct cache
      CLEANUP: fd: place the lock at the beginning of struct fdtab
      CLEANUP: pools: align pools on a cache line
      BUG/MAJOR: threads/queue: avoid recursive locking in 
pendconn_get_next_strm()
      BUILD: Makefile: reorder object files by size
      [RELEASE] Released version 1.8.0
---

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