Big CIFS/SMB3 Improvements Head To Linux 4.19

[ermo]

What people, what filesystems?

FUSE is mostly used for NTFS (and exfat) support on Linux, and its performance is kinda bad, it exists only for interoperatibility with Windows.

Samba is a resource pig already, if you add FUSE to the party it's going to be unusable.

Depends on your expectations I guess?

I run a Samba 4.7.x server @home that shares a SnapRAID media library through a MergerFS mount point. Despite the fact that MergerFS is implemented with FUSE, I can saturate a single GbE link in that configuration with the server running a Ph II X6 1090T.

So what you are implying is not what I'm seeing. But maybe my requirements for "usable" differ from yours.

[starshipeleven]

Depends on your expectations I guess?

I run a Samba 4.7.x server @home that shares a SnapRAID media library through a MergerFS mount point. Despite the fact that MergerFS is implemented with FUSE, I can saturate a single GbE link in that configuration with the server running a Ph II X6 1090T.

So what you are implying is not what I'm seeing. But maybe my requirements for "usable" differ from yours.

First of all, thanks for your real-life example.

That's a processor that performs like a modern i3, you could still game on that CPU. Also, FUSE mostly degrades random access speed and latencies, not top transfer speed.

Anyway, as a comparison I can saturate a GbE link with a RAID1 ext4 mdadm array with NFS, from a Zyxel NSA325 nas using a pretty meh Kirwkood SoC (ARMv5 1.6ghz, singlecore) running Debian ARM.

[gmturner]

You must being facetious. Ever heard of FUSE? People use filesystems all the time without it being in kernel.

Fuse has some limitations. Once you start stacking block, fuse, and kernel file system drivers in sufficiently creative ways, some very bad things can start to happen to your kernel, i.e., it's not super hard to wind up locking your entire kernel up in some sort of highly complicated dining-philosophers type of situation where everything just comes to a halt without technically entering an error state. Also there's some security problems with fuse that make it unsuitable for highly secure types of usage.

As for cifs, I'm not sure why it's so terrible... Is there a competing, superior network file system protocol against which samba compares poorly? NFS... always seemed pretty wierd to me but probably performed marginally better for linux<->linux FS sharing (but that was just my subjective impression from ages ago). "distributed-block devices" seem to work but are a patently ridiculous way to achieve file system sharing (kind of analogous to solving security/resource partitioning with emulators). Otherwise... I have yet to find anything that cuts much mustard in home or business environments....

Perhaps there should be a better network filesystem but somebody has to invent it first? If I'm wrong, by all means please clue me in, I'd love to discover that I missed something and am way off base about this..

[ermo]

Perhaps there should be a better network filesystem but somebody has to invent it first? If I'm wrong, by all means please clue me in, I'd love to discover that I missed something and am way off base about this..

I was under the impression that 9p / styx was already invented? But maybe that doesn't count?

The Styx protocol

Styx's place in the world is analogous to Sun NFS or Microsoft CIFS, although it is simpler and easier to implement. Furthermore, NFS and CIFS are designed for sharing regular disk files; NFS in particular is intimately tied to the implementation and caching strategy of the underlying UNIX file system. Unlike Styx, NFS and CIFS are clumsier at exporting dynamic device-like files such as /dev/mouse

(source)

[starshipeleven]

As for cifs, I'm not sure why it's so terrible... Is there a competing, superior network file system protocol against which samba compares poorly?

Everything performs decently as long as you provide it enough hardware performance. Samba requires more hardware performance than NFS for example.

I have yet to find anything that cuts much mustard in home or business environments....

Environments where 99.9% is Windows.

Perhaps there should be a better network filesystem but somebody has to invent it first?

Yeah it usually works like that.

But Wireguard appeared out of nothing too, so why not a new network filesharing protocol?

[starshipeleven]

I was under the impression that 9p / styx was already invented? But maybe that doesn't count?

Looks neat, I'll have to try it out.
Thanks

[EarthMind]

That sounds more like a problem with the iSCSI implementation on one end or the other. I've used iSCSI over 10 Gbps Ethernet for virtual machines and it was indistinguishable from local SSD.

Yeah, that's the most common practise AFAIK. But I've done my tests and with the same setup, but different connection protocol, SMB direct proved to be better in performance for both seq and random data. Also MS promotes it as a better performing alternative to ISCSI.