SMB3.11 Unix Extensions current status

There have been a lot of talks in the past years about how to present Linux/Posix semantics over the SMB3.11 protocol to provide an alternative to the NFS protocol for installations that already have existing SMB infrastructure and who could benefit from better semantics when sharing files to Linux and other Posix-based file server clients.

In the past few months there has been a great deal of progress in Samba towards the goal of better supporting Linux clients. Notable changes are improvements to present special files like sockets and FIFO files to clients. There has been improvements to better support operations like chmod and chown in the Linux client and the Samba server.

The biggest change on the Samba side has been an overhaul of handling native symlinks. Samba 4.22 will present symlinks for Posix clients in the same way Windows presents symlinks it finds on its local NTFS file system.

This talk will present the current status of the ongoing work to improve Linux file system semantics presented over the SMB protocol.