One fallout of Samba's protection against symlink races was a slowdown of pathname handling. This talk will present the current status at the time of the conference of the ongoing work to fix the slowdown by using modern Posix and in particular Linux/FreeBSD APIs.

This talk is going to give an overview of recent changes in the Samba fileserver and an outlook on the development roadmap. Recent development has been mainly focusing on security resulting in the release of Samba 4.15 last year. Looking forward 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.

To implement SMB2 unix extensions, smbd needs to implement ntfs reparse points to present symlinks, sockets and other special files to clients. This talk will present an overview of what reparse points are at their core and where Samba stands to implement them. Also, it will highlight the current status of the Linux kernel SMB client implementation regarding reparse points and special files over SMB2.

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.