The Past, Present and Future of Samba Messaging

Samba components have to talk to each other. One of the original requirements for messaging are oplock breaks: One smbd has to tell another smbd to give up an oplock. This used to be done via local UDP packets until it was converted to use a general, tdb-based messaging API. The Samba4 effort by Tridge implemented messaging on top of local unix domain datagram sockets. Samba 4.2 has a new implementation of this concept.

Meanwhile ctdb provides clusterwide messaging, using a central daemon per cluster node which is aware of the cluster configuration.

The talk will describe the various implementations in detail, their strengths and weaknesses. It will also describe possible future developments for high-performance local and clusterwide messaging. It will give Samba implementors an overview of a critical piece of the Samba architecture and where it is headed.

Learning Objectives

Learn about Samba architecture
Find out about Samba clustering directions
Get insight about Samba performance and scalability improvements