[linux-cifs-client] year in review

[Steve French]

Starting the new year, it is interesting to review what has changed in
the Linux cifs client since last year at this time.

A year ago 2.6.20-rc1 was out (2.6.19 kernel included cifs version
1.46).  Now we are at 2.6.24-rc7 (cifs version 1.52).

Since 2.6.20-rc1, more than 190 changesets went into cifs.  The most
active year for cifs development yet.  Patches and suggestions and bug
reports and requests came from a wide variety of sources.   cifs was
used to store the data for the editing/creating of some well known
movies that came out in the last year.

Kerberos support was added, IPv6 support was added.  NTLMv2 support
was finished (including signing).  Key POSIX extensions to the CIFS
protocol were defined, tested and added to the Linux cifs client (and
Samba server).  cifs documentation was improved.  POSIX file semantics
were improved.  cifsacl support (for emulating the mode when mounted
to Windows servers which don't support mode bits)  was added.
Stability was improved, with many bug fixes added. The CIFS client was
tested at all of the major conferences, but particular progress was
made at Connectathon, at SambaXP and at the Google CIFS conference.
Testing with the CIFS client also led to multiple key bug fixes being
made to Samba server.  And finally performance was dramatically
improved, especially for write and mkdir.  See iozone run below:

A) performance of the 2.6.20 version of cifs client ported to run on
the same kernel
                                                            random
random    bkwd
KB  reclen   write rewrite    read    reread    read   write    read
512       4   65215   10809   208389  1166528 1570551 1187934   55107


B) current cifs iozone performance (note that higher is better)
                                                            random
random    bkwd
KB  reclen   write rewrite    read    reread    read   write    read
512       4  492774 1315965  1350584  1651192 1585139 1187934 1296202


I am excited about some of the changes that will go into 2.6.25
(including Q's DFS patches, and additional performance improvements)


-- 
Thanks,

Steve