[linux-cifs-client] Welcome and initial cifs vfs testing

[Steven French]

Welcome to the cifs vfs client mailing list.

This list was created for technical discussion and announcements for the 
new linux cifs vfs client included in the 2.6 Linux Kernel and some Linux 
distributions (such as UnitedLinux) who have patched the 2.4 version into 
their 2.4 kernel.

The current version submitted to Linus for 2.6 (pending inclusion) is 
0.9.9 and is doing fairly well on testing and is much improved.    Issues 
to address still:

1 - Although POSIX comformance is reasonable there are a few subtle 
problems left e.g. the connectathon "nfs" test suite (posix file api 
conformance) shows a few minor problems which should be possible in theory 
to address with cifs (the protocol) with minor changes to cifs (the 
filesystem implementation).   connectathon lock test 7 fails and some of 
the later parts of the "-s" ("special") tests fail (slightly differently 
to Windows and Samba servers).  Both need additional analysis. 

2 - do_mount still needs to be invoked in kernel for "dfs" redirects and 
an upcall mechanism to a user space daemon thread for resolving dns to ip 
address needs to be written

3 - spnego encapsulation of Kerberos tickets (and a mechanism to contact 
pam_mount, pam_kerberos or winbindd to get the service ticket for the 
target server) needs to be completed so we do not rely solely on NTLM as 
the preferred authentication mechanism
 
The current version in Samba CVS (for 2.4) is 0.9.9 which needs additional 
testing.

It would be very helpful if someone could script invocation of the common 
filesystem tests (fsx, connectathon "nfs" test, dbench, iozone, bonnie and 
fsstress eg) to two or more target mounts (I will mount one to Samba and 
one to at least one Windows server version) so the regression test for 
each minor cifs vfs version could be better automated.

In general performance of the cifs vfs on 2.6 kernel is good but could 
approach nfs speeds (Linux nfs v3 is reasonably optimized for performance) 
with a slightly different better parallelized implementation of 
cifs_readpages and an implementation of writepages


Steve French
Senior Software Engineer
Linux Technology Center - IBM Austin
phone: 512-838-2294
email: sfrench at-sign us dot ibm dot com
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