SMB3 has seen significant adoption as the storage protocol of choice for running private cloud deployments. With the recent advances in persistent memory technologies, we will take a look at how we can leverage the SMB3 protocol in conjunction with SMBDirect/RDMA to provide very low latency access to persistent memory devices across the network. With the increasing popularity of cloud storage - technologies like Azure Files which provide seamless access to cloud stored data via the standard SMB3 protocol is seeing significant interest.

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.

Over the past year many improvements have been made in Linux for accessing files remotely. This has been a great year for cifs.ko with the addition of new SMB3.1.1 features and optimizations. It continues to be the most active network/cluster file system on Linux. Improvements to performance with handle leases (deferred close), multichannel, signing improvements, huge gains in read ahead performance, and directory and metadata caching improvements have been made. And security has improved with support for the strongest encryption, and more recently the exciting work on QUIC.

Samba had experimental support for multi-channel for quite a while. SMB3 has a few concepts to replay requests safely. We now implement them completely (and in parts better than a Windows Server). The talk will explain how we implemented the missing features. With the increasing amount of network throughput, we'll reach a point where a data copies are too much for a single cpu core to handle. This talk gives an overview about how the io_uring infrastructure of the Linux kernel could be used in order to avoid copying data, as well as spreading the load between cpu cores.

SMB3 has seen significant adoption as the storage protocol of choice for running private cloud deployments. In this iteration of the talk, we’ll update the audience on SMB protocol changes as well as improvements to the Windows implementation of the SMB server and client. Added to the SMB protocol is a new server-to-client notification mechanism, which enables a variety of novel use cases. We’ll present the details of protocol messaging (new message types, etc) as well as the one scenario which leverages this new mechanism (server-triggered graceful session closure).

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.

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.

Born in the '80s, the SMB family of protocols has been evolving for many years, with the latest version, SMB3.1.1, continuing to add features in order to support the largest breadth of clients (and an incredibly wide variety of servers).

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.

Technically, everything would be new since Apple has never given a talk about what is in our SMB Client. We will cover: 1. Multichannel implementation and how client NICs are selected and logic for handling multiple channels 2. Lease implementation current and upcoming changes in macOS Ventura 3. Upcoming changes in macOS Ventura for searching over SMB 4. Touch on dateless file support for SMB in macOS 5. Touch on Snapshot support for SMB in macOS