SNIA Developer Conference September 15-17, 2025 | Santa Clara, CA
Ralph Böhme
Samba Team Lead
Samba Team / SerNet
Ralph Böhme is a member of the international Samba Team and works for SerNet.
Related Sessions
The New Samba VFS
Starting with version 4.14 Samba provides core infrastructure code that allows basing all access to the server's filesystem on file handles and not on paths. An example of this is using fstat() instead of stat(), or SMB_VFS_FSTAT() instead of SMB_VFS_STAT() in Samba parlance. Historically Samba's fileserver code had to deal a lot with processing path based SMB requests. While the SMB protocol itself has been streamlined to be purely handle based starting with SMB2, large parts of infrastructure code remains in place that will "degrade" handle based SMB2 requests to path based filesystem access. In order to fully leverage the handle based nature of the SMB2 protocol we came up with a straight forward way to convert this infrastructure code, so it can be converted to make use of a purely handle based VFS interface. The talk will present what we have achieved so far and what is left to do. It's intented audience is anyone working on the Samba fileserver code and anyone working on Samba VFS modules.
net use //samba/cloud: Scaling Samba
Current clustered Samba uses its homegrown distributed database "ctdb" as a storage backend for maintaining coherent fileserver state. ctdb predates most cloudy distributed NoSQL databases that came to rise on the wings of the likes of Google Bigtable, Amazon Dynamo, Apache Cassandra and so on in the 2000's. It has worked extremely well for the high performance scaleout NAS usecase, but the emerging shift to the cloud entails serious scalability, elasticity and managability challenges. So are there alternatives to ctdb? At SambaXP'23 I took we shared the results of a functional and performance evaluation of severl Open Source distributed databases. In this presentation I'll share the latest results of large scaleout test with FoundationDB.
Samba Development Status Update
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.