Presented by

  • Steven French

    Steven French

    Steve French is a Principal Software Engineer for Microsoft Azure Storage, and the original author and maintainer of the Linux cifs/smb3 client, and a member of the Samba team, and former chair of the SNIA CIFS Working Group, and is a frequent speaker at Linux and Storage events.

Abstract

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. And now with the addition of a kernel server to Linux (ksmbd), there are multiple Linux server options (Samba and ksmbd). 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. Many other security improvements have been added and will be described. This presentation will go through the features added over the past year to the Linux client, and demonstrate how they help common scenarios, from accessing the cloud faster (like Azure) to accessing Samba, Windows, Macs and the new Linux kernel server (ksmbd).