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The performance requirements needed to power GPU-based computing use cases for AI/DL and other high-performance workflows are challenged by the performance limitations of legacy file and object storage systems. Typically, such use cases have needed to deploy parallel file systems such as Lustre or others, which require networking and skillsets not typically available in standard Enterprise data centers.

The Ceph storage ecosystem currently covers the full range of File, Object and Block access with Ceph-specific protocols. Standard NAS protocols such as SMB and NFS were recently added and expanded to allow client-native protocols to consume this scale out file storage.

The Linux in-kernel NFS server continues its history of innovation, leveraging the rich storage and network ecosystems available in the Linux kernel. This talk covers accomplishments made during the past year and provides a roadmap for new developments planned for the near future. Topics will include:

Samba 4.20 will ship with rpcd_witness, which provides a service for MS-SWN within a ctdb cluster. This service can be used by a client in order to monitor cluster nodes and gives an administrator the chance to move specific connection to another node. The talk explains the current state, the design and some strange things a Windows client is doing.

To a long-time SMB developer the NFSv4 RFC looks remarkably familiar. In an effort to provide interoperable locking infrastructure, I have taken a closer look at what NFSv4 provides. This talk will present my current understanding of where NFSv4 and SMB provide similarities and where a common infrastructure could benefit both protocols.

In today’s AI driven workloads read performance matters a lot. There are three main ways we can make sure that read performance is good

1. Getting data from kernel page cache to avoid latency from fetching data from storage device.
2. Proactively prefetching data from storage device in background, so that next read request will find data in kernel page cache.
3. Keep discarding pages which are no longer used so that there can be more room for prefetching data from storage devices to kernel page cache.

This talk is going to give an overview of recent changes in the Samba fileserver and an outlook on the development roadmap. There are many things the Samba fileserver development team has on its todo list and this presentation will give a first hand insight into the making of the next Samba versions.

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Talking about changes to the macOS SMB Client from Apple since 2022. What have we added, improved or just changed.