Advancing Access to Remote Files: Exploring Recent Enhancements to the Linux SMB3.1.1 Client

The Linux SMB3.1.1 client continues to be one of the most active filesystems in Linux with many improvements added each year, enhancing its ability to securely, reliably and efficiently access remote data. This presentation will cover new features added to the Linux client, and new features you can expect to see over the coming year. Whether accessing data from the smallest devices or the largest (and even the cloud), getting at remote files matters. The SMB3.1.1 client continues to be the most active network/cluster filesystem on Linux over the past year, with many recent enhancements, and progress on servers on Linux (Samba and also the kernel server ksmbd) has also been excellent. Over the past year, significant improvements have been made to metadata and directory caching, multichannel performance, symlink handling, remote swapfiles, improved readahead, better file caching, enhanced POSIX/Linux compatibility, improved TMPFILE support, and even improvements to DFS (global name space support). It has been a great year for the Linux client, but we will also describe some of the improvements to the Linux kernel server (ksmbd) and how the addition of the Linux kernel server has helped advance the kernel client even faster.