Samsung Revs Its In-Kernel SMB3 Server Focused On Fast Performance, New Features

[tildearrow]

Either you are being intentionally silly, or you seem to have forgotten a few things ...

I am sure he is kidding.

[perpetually high]

Lucjan added the patches, I added it to my build script for 5.13 if anyone wants to give it a whirl. Disabled by default, flip it on with CONFIG_SMB_SERVER=y.

[mppix]

Very good! SMB is one of the really few things that M$ has done right.
Perfect for small/medium networks.

Anyway, a big problem with current implementation is the tooling/integration with file browser and such.
If you set it up with config files and start all the various services it works, but it's an hassle if you just want to quickly share an arbitrary directory á-la FTP/SSH.
Maybe it will be ezier to interact with a kernal FS?

Anyway, do you know what Gn*me is using for their filesharing implementation?

Webdav is the default for file/folder sharing in Gnome/Ubuntu (settings/sharing).
However, many tutorials recommend samba, which creates a decent amount of confusion.

[mppix]

Webdav sucks pretty badly. I have absolutely no idea why anyone would even consider webdav over any other file sharing protocol in 2021. Please explain.

This is an old discussion - to summarize: neither webdav nor smb is clearly better in all cases but you also find things like

https://serverdiary.com/featured/webdav-vs-samba-cifs-file-system-write-and-read-speed-test/

Personally, I choose Webdav any time mainly because of the built in security that permits WAN use and a second encryption layer on LAN. Also, I can saturate 10Gbe links with both with similar throughput, so?

[Cape]

Webdav is the default for file/folder sharing in Gnome/Ubuntu (settings/sharing).
However, many tutorials recommend samba, which creates a decent amount of confusion.

Well, that's also a pretty good implementation. Bit iffy at times, but i remember that, the couple of times I tried it, I managed to use it without pulling up the Arch Wiki. If they added a sharing option directly from Nautilus right-click menu (or 3rd party in general) it would be perfect.

[uid313]

Either you are being intentionally silly, or you seem to have forgotten a few things ...

I don't know much about kernels or computer science, but to me it sounds insane to put servers in the kernel. It doesn't sound like it belongs in there, it sounds bloated, and it doesn't sound secure.

I think the kernel should be a small piece of robust software with a limited scope.

[sdack]

I don't know much about kernels or computer science, but to me it sounds insane to put servers in the kernel. It doesn't sound like it belongs in there, it sounds bloated, and it doesn't sound secure.

I think the kernel should be a small piece of robust software with a limited scope.

You have a good way of seeing things. However, some applications produce a lot of overhead when implemented in user-space. So does a file server in user-space have to get the data from the drives, which means the data has to go through the driver, the block layer, the system caches and the file system, to then be passed into user-space, and from there back into kernel-space, to networking and the network drivers. If then most of what an application does is to serve data without even touching it then placing it into kernel-space means it avoids the entire transition of the data into user-space and back. For fast file servers with high-speed connections and fast drives can the overhead of the data transfer between kernel-space and user-space place a noticeable delay and reduction on the performance. When it is then done directly in the kernel does it not only reduce the overhead, but it can also take a few further shortcuts and produce an even bigger gain.

The Linux kernel these days is then more than just one piece of code with one scope, but it consists of many parts, multiple layers and scopes. Without it could we also not have virtual machines with guest hosts in the kernel, but we would need to implement these in user-space, with all the drawbacks that come from this.

[mppix]

Well, that's also a pretty good implementation. Bit iffy at times, but i remember that, the couple of times I tried it, I managed to use it without pulling up the Arch Wiki. If they added a sharing option directly from Nautilus right-click menu (or 3rd party in general) it would be perfect.

When gnome filesharing is enabled the public folder is exposed via webdav (unless a firewall blocks the needed port).
I prefer to just copy shared information to one folder.
However file based sharing may be also be feasible.

[flower]

This is an old discussion - to summarize: neither webdav nor smb is clearly better in all cases but you also find things like

https://serverdiary.com/featured/webdav-vs-samba-cifs-file-system-write-and-read-speed-test/

Personally, I choose Webdav any time mainly because of the built in security that permits WAN use and a second encryption layer on LAN. Also, I can saturate 10Gbe links with both with similar throughput, so?

Try that again with many small files. I highly doubt webdav even get near the performance of smb.

I really would love to see a webdav successor with a similar security profile

[caligula]

Try that again with many small files. I highly doubt webdav even get near the performance of smb.

I really would love to see a webdav successor with a similar security profile

Indeed the largest problem with webdav is, it has a horrible overhead when dealing with large IOPS counts and concurrent file operations. Moreover the fuse/davfs2 implementation is pretty awful, it doesn't do aggressive caching which makes all file system operations dog slow. For instance running 'df' might take 5 seconds, depending on your network latency.