Steven French

Accessing servers from Linux over SMB3.1.1 continues to improve in exciting ways. This talk will explore the latest enhancements to the Linux SMB3.1.1 client, enabling more secure, efficient, and compatible access to remote storage across a wide range of SMB3 file servers—including Samba, Azure (the "largest server in the world"), ksmbd, Windows, NetApp, and macOS. There are also exciting improvements to smbdirect (SMB over RDMA), including making this high-performance path easier to use for both the client and server, as well as userspace applications like Samba. Over the past year, major improvements have been made to performance (e.g. smarter use of directory leases, better metadata caching, and multiple netfs enhancements for improved data caching), security (e.g., new authentication mechanisms and better support for password rotation), and POSIX compatibility (including continued testing and improvement of the SMB3.1.1 POSIX Extensions). Support for special file types has been enhanced, and support for several new Linux system calls has been added. The Linux SMB3.1.1 client remains one of the most active filesystems in the kernel, and userspace tooling has also seen significant evolution. This presentation will also highlight recent progress in the in-kernel SMB server (ksmbd), which is rapidly gaining functionality and performance improvements, making it more useful in embedded, testing, and lightweight server scenarios. Attendees will leave with a practical understanding of how to leverage these new features in real workloads—and a preview of what’s coming next for SMB3.1.1 on Linux.

Steven French

Principal Software Engineer

Microsoft

Linux's ability to access files remotely via SMB3.1.1 continues to improve. Many new SMB3.1.1 features and optimizations have been implemented and with the new kernel server Linux (ksmbd) in mainline Linux there are now multiple Linux server options (Samba and ksmbd). Performance has improved with better use of leases in metadata caching, and dynamic reconfiguration of network interfaces and enhanced parallelization has improved multichannel performance. Support for compressed network mounts and SMB3.1.1 packet signing has also progressed, and the read ahead and offline caching mechanisms have been rewritten. Cross-mount server side copy is now possible too. Security improvements have been made, including removing support for weaker legacy authentication algorithms. The kernel server has made great progress, including some great RDMA (smbdirect) performance improvements and improvements in quality and testing. This presentation will go through the features added over the past year to the Linux client (and kernel server) and demonstrate how they help common scenarios, accessing a wide variety of SMB3.1.1 servers: including the cloud (e.g. Azure), Samba, Windows, Macs and the new Linux kernel server (ksmbd), and also discuss where we need to go to improve SMB3.1.1 even more for Linux.

Steven French

Principal Software Engineer

Microsoft

The Linux SMB3.1.1 client continues to be one of the most active filesystems in Linux with many improvements added each year, enhancing its ability to securely, reliably and efficiently access remote data. This presentation will cover new features added to the Linux client, and new features you can expect to see over the coming year. Whether accessing data from the smallest devices or the largest (and even the cloud), getting at remote files matters. The SMB3.1.1 client continues to be the most active network/cluster filesystem on Linux over the past year, with many recent enhancements, and progress on servers on Linux (Samba and also the kernel server ksmbd) has also been excellent. Over the past year, significant improvements have been made to metadata and directory caching, multichannel performance, symlink handling, remote swapfiles, improved readahead, better file caching, enhanced POSIX/Linux compatibility, improved TMPFILE support, and even improvements to DFS (global name space support). It has been a great year for the Linux client, but we will also describe some of the improvements to the Linux kernel server (ksmbd) and how the addition of the Linux kernel server has helped advance the kernel client even faster.

Steven French

Principal Software Engineer

Microsoft

Discover the latest advancements in Linux file access, and explore recent enhancements to the Linux SMB3.1.1 client. It has been another great year of progress in improving access to remote storage from Linux whether in the cloud and or the wide variety of SMB3 file servers (Azure, Windows, Samba, ksmbd, Netapp, Macs and many others). Many improvements have been made to securely, reliably and efficiently access remote data. The Linux SMB3.1.1 client, cifs.ko, continues to be one of the most active filesystems in Linux. This presentation will cover new security, performance and reliability features recently added to the Linux client, and also new features you can expect to see over the coming year. Whether accessing data from the smallest devices or the largest (and even the cloud) these improvements are very exciting. Over the past year, new security features have been added, performance has improved, as has support for folios and the new Linux memory management model. Directory caching is now faster and more flexible, more POSIX/Linux compatibility features have been added, support for swapfiles over SMB3.1.1 mounts has improved, as has support for special Linux file types. As we add support for new authentication options for Linux (not just Kerberos and NTLMSSP), and also as we add support for SMB3.1.1 over QUIC (using the exciting new Linux kernel QUIC driver), and stronger and faster packet signing, SMB3.1.1 will be able to better address evolving security requirements, not just on-prem but also in the cloud. The protocol already supports extremely strong encryption options, and also man in the middle attack prevention. This presentation will describe many of these SMB3.1.1 features and improvements, and how to best use them to improve your workloads.

Steven French

Principal Software Engineer

Microsoft

Great progress has been made in the development of the new experimental Linux kernel driver for QUIC. QUIC avoids many of the performance problems that TCP/IP has (and also adds encryption support). While QUIC is already supported by multiple non-Linux SMB3.1.1 clients and servers, Linux has until recently lacked a kernel driver for this networking protocol. This presentation will describe the current state of testing and development of the new kernel QUIC driver with SMB3.1.1 mounts on Linux, and what we have observed as we tested the new driver. As the kernel QUIC driver improves, its use could expand broadly for Linux storage workloads. For SMB3.1.1 use of QUIC has an additional advantage of avoiding the "port 445" problem that some SMB3.1.1 users experience when they can't access remote servers due to port blockage. More importantly QUIC improves performance for many network use cases, reducing latency, improving congestion control and better multiplexing.

Steven French

Principal Software Engineer

Microsoft