SMB3.11: Recent Improvements in Linux Access to the Cloud, NAS and Popular SMB3 Based Systems

Exciting improvements to the Linux kernel client over the past year have improved performance of large files access, especially with the integration of RDMA support (“SMB Direct” support) and also with many metadata and compounding optimizations which help access to large directories, especially in the cloud (like Azure Files). In addition support for directory leases (and many other caching improvements) has also helped performance. The ability to do new workloads, more efficient compounding of complex operations for improved performance, changes to more easily recover from failures, improvements to DFS/Global Namespace support, improved metadata handling, many security enhancements, and changes to the default protocol dialects, have made this a great year for improvements to Linux SMB3/SMB3.11 support.

In addition, the POSIX extensions to the SMB3.11 protocol have greatly improved with testing over the past year, especially from Linux and Samba, and are leading to additional workloads being possible now over SMB3.11.

This presentation will demonstrate and describe some of the new features and progress over the past year in accessing modern servers and the cloud (Azure) via SMB3/SMB3.11 using Linux clients, as well as how to configure this optimally.

Learning Objectives:
1. What new features are available in Linux now to access NAS filers and the Cloud via SMB3 and how do I use them?
2. What types of workloads is SMB3 now much better at in Linux?
3. What do the broad Linux functional tests (e.g. xfstests) show are the remaining gaps - features that work to a local file system but not to a network file system like cifs.ko (SMB3 on Linux)?
4. How should you configure your Linux client to optimally access various targets?
5. What is the outlook for new features to expect over the next few kernel releases?