[OpenIndiana-discuss] CIFS and openindiana

[Richard Elling]

On Jul 11, 2013, at 9:30 AM, Laurent Blume <laurent+oi at elanor.org> wrote:

> On 2013-07-11 6:56 PM, James Carlson wrote:
>> I've been using it for a while, first on OpenSolaris.
> 
> Yes, me too, on and off until S11.1, when I dumped it for good because
> it annoyed me one time too many. I do know the thing :-)
> 
>> Simple: integration with ZFS.  That's the killer feature for me, because
>> it makes the CIFS exports as easy to manage as my NFS exports.
> 
> Okay, fair enough, it is a good feature. But that answer makes me wonder.
> 
> Look at this:
> 
> # net rpc share list
> Enter root's password:
> print$
> IPC$
> 
> # zfs list
> NAME    USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
> lpool   460K   402G   136K  /lpool
> 
> # zfs create -o sharesmb=on lpool/test

Yep, the ZFS code can use system() or its equivalent :-)

> 
> # zfs list
> NAME         USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
> lpool        656K   402G   136K  /lpool
> lpool/test   136K   402G   136K  /lpool/test
> 
> # net rpc share list
> Enter root's password:
> print$
> IPC$
> lpool_test
> 
> # uname -a
> Linux wenjun 3.5.0-18-generic #29-Ubuntu SMP Thu Oct 25 07:26:14 UTC
> 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
> 
> It's just something that can already be done equally well with Samba.
> This community should keep an eye on the outside world, things are
> moving there too.
> 
> Right now, I can't think of anything that the OI CIFS server can do,
> that Samba cannot.
> So we should not believe in past Sun/Oracle propaganda that only the
> magic of a kernelized server could do those things, ot fall prey to the
> NIH syndrom.

Actually, I have seen workloads that Samba can't handle because of its
single-threaded design. This is a conscious decision by the developers and
suits them just fine: they prefer portability over OS-specific optimizations and
writing or debugging good multithreaded apps can be hard.

I don't think NIH applies here. It is more a matter of priority, business opportunity
and resources. There are very few people on the planet who have the domain
expertise needed to build an SMB service from scratch, especially given the
state of the public documentation on the protocol. The Samba team has commercial
backing and the domain expertise. Microsoft has little incentive to be more open
in this regard. So, there it is.
 -- richard

--

Richard.Elling at RichardElling.com
+1-760-896-4422