Improvements to Accessing Network Files from Linux: SMB3 client progress

The Linux SMB3 client continues to be the most active network/cluster filesystem on Linux over the past year, and the progress on Samba server and the Linux kernel server has helped add new features to the SMB3.1.1 client in Linux, and made these improvements even more important.

It has been a great year for SMB with the addition of many security improvements, many performance improvements including to caching and RDMA (smbdirect) as well as dramatic improvements to multichannel, and new sparse file features. Support for the Witness protocol (allowing transparent movement to a different server) has been added, as well as the new more feature rich Linux mount API. In addition support for the final piece of the optional SMB 3.1.1 POSIX protocol extensions was completed. Tooling has been improved with many new features added to tools like smbinfo, and support for easily getting and setting more auditing and security information.

This presentation will go through some of the new features added to the Linux client over the past year, and demonstrate the great progress in access various types of network storage, including the cloud (e.g. Azure), and Samba and Windows server and also the new Linux kernel server (ksmbd).