Samba into kernel

[Jeremy Allison]

On Sat, Mar 23, 2002 at 07:00:18PM +0000, David Lee wrote:
> In recent weeks, I have had a quick chat, off-list, with a well-known list
> member about the possibility and desirability of allowing parts of Samba
> to be put into the kernel of those versions of UNIX (Solaris for me) that
> support it. 

Solaris is not GPL. Doing this for your own site would be fine,
distributing such a version would not be (unless Sun was willing
to make the positive step of GPLing Solaris).

> There would probably be other benefits, such as
> the opportunity to allow oplocks to interact more closely with UNIX
> locking.

You can do this without embedding Samba into the kernel. See the
kernel oplocks code to support the IRIX and Linux versions of this.

> We noted that Veritas already seem to have done this in the ServPoint
> software (see their White Paper "VERITAS ServPoint Appliance Software for
> NAS", pages 2 and 3).  This re-assured us that my thoughts were at least
> partially sane.

Yes, but VERITAS didn't use any Samba code in-kernel, they added their
own code to Solaris and then modified Samba to call it.

> Naturally, this would be a significant piece of work.  So the principle
> would require the approval of the Samba Team, and I would guess that any
> implementation would also require the involvement, even if only as
> occasional over-seer, of a Team member (the bulk of the work may well be
> done by others). 
> 
> Is there any mileage in this possibility?  Or should I stop right there? 

On GPLed Operating Systems - certainly. Not for proprietary ones I'm
afraid.

Jeremy.