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  5. Differences Between WinDRBD 1.x Branches

Differences Between WinDRBD 1.x Branches

The LINBIT® team released WinDRBD 1.2.0 in June 2025. This is the first stable version of the WinDRBD 1.2 branch.

Notable changes from the latest version (1.1.20) of the WinDRBD 1.1 branch are:

  • WinDRBD 1.2.x uses the latest DRBD® engines which are, at the time of this writing, DRBD 9.2.14 and DRBD 9.3.0. The LINBIT team will release WinDRBD versions based on a 9.2 and a 9.3 DRBD engine in parallel.
  • Building WinDRBD 1.2.x is easier than building previous WinDRBD versions. You can build WinDRBD 1.2.x entirely on a Linux system, compared to needing a mixed setup (Windows and Linux) to build WinDRBD 1.1.
  • WinDRBD 1.2.x uses a different compiler than previous versions to build the DRBD engine and the WinDRBD cross kernel compatibility layer. You can now compile WinDRBD 1.2 with the GNU compiler collection (gcc) and debug WinDRBD with GNU debugging tools (gdb). Because DRBD is a Linux kernel driver that uses many gcc-specific extensions to the C language, compiling with gcc (in contrast to compiling with Microsoft Visual C) requires significantly fewer patches to the DRBD engine source code.
  • At build time, you can select the DRBD engine branch you want to use. This works for DRBD 9.0, 9.1, 9.2 and 9.3 1.
  • Many subsystems of the WinDRBD compatibility layer have been re-enginieered. This makes for better performing software and a smoother user experience.
  • WinDRBD 1.2 is integrated in the DRBD 9 test suite. This means that every (pushed) commit is tested for software regressions (new defects not present in a previous commit) and overall stability.
  • Patches to DRBD originating from WinDRBD development are now maintained in the DRBD repository itself. This happens on separate branches in the DRBD repository, where the branch naming follows this convention: win/windrbd-1.2-drbd-9.2.14. There are also two Coccinelle (spatch) generated patches remaining. These are applied when WinDRBD is built.
  • ReactOS was added to the list of supported target platforms. This is interesting because now you can debug WinDRBD (and the ReactOS kernel) with GNU compatible tools such as gdb.

Downloading and installing WinDRBD

The LINBIT team provides pre-compiled installer packages for modern 64-bit Windows versions under the “DRBD 9 Windows Driver” section of the LINBIT Software Downloads page on the LINBIT website. To load the WinDRBD driver, you need to put the target Windows system into Test Mode.

LINBIT customers can access officially signed driver packages. You can install these driver packages without having to put the target system into Test Mode. For customer evaluation access, contact the LINBIT team.

Conclusion

If you are still running WinDRBD 1.1, there is no urgent need to upgrade to a WinDRBD 1.2 version. If you have a new deployment, you should use WinDRBD 1.2.

Written by, JK-T, 2025-07-01.

  1. Support for building WinDRBD based on DRBD 9.0 or DRBD 9.1 engines will likely drop, in favor of later versions, because the DRBD developers no longer maintain these older versions. ↩︎