KSMBD Finally Reaches a Stable State
For those who've been looking forward to the first release of KSMBD, after two years it's no longer considered experimental.
KSMBD (Kernel SMB Daemon) is the in-kernel module, developed by Samsung, that implements the SMB/CIFS protocol for sharing files and folders over a network. SMB3 server could take the place of the traditional Samba software.
KSMBD was originally merged for Linux 5.15 but was tagged as experimental. That came about in 2021, and it's taken some time to get KSMBD to a state that was considered stable. That time has come, and KSMBD is planned for Linux kernel 6.6.
But why is KSMBD important? First off, it promises considerable performance gains and better support for modern features such as Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA). KSMBD also supports a number of features such as multiple dialects (SMB2.1, SMB3.0, SMB3.1), oplock cache mechanism, compound requests, ACL, and DCE/RPC.
KSMBD also adds enhanced security, considerably better performance for both single and multi-thread read/write, better stability, and higher compatibility.
In the end, hopefully, this KSMBD will also mean easier share setups in Linux without having to jump through the same hoops one must with the traditional Samba setup.
Only time will tell. Until then, you can read more about KSMBD from this LWN article.
