Samba 4.4 Officially Released With Async Flush Requests, Experimental Multi-Channel

For those relying upon the Samba open-source project as a SMB/CIFS implementation for being able to interact with file and print services from Microsoft Windows systems, Samba 4.4.0 is now available.

One of the big features of Samba 4.4 is support for asynchronous flush requests for SMB2/SMB3 clients. Samba 4.4 also has a number of improvements to samba-tool, smbstatus improvements, improvements to KCC but still being disabled by default, DNS server improvements, and various other enhancements. The asynchronous flush requests allow SMB2/SMB3 clients to not block other operations when handling flushes.

An experimental feature of Samba 4.4 is support for SMB3 multi-channel, which is a protocol feature for letting the client bind multiple transport connections into one authenticated SMB session -- thereby yielding better throughput and greater fault tolerance.

More details on Samba 4.4 can be found via today's release notes.