Pushing Samba functions into the kernel

[Steven French]

>jra wrote
>
>Ok, my feelings on "Samba in the kernel" are the following.
>
>1). We need to be able to de-multiplex incoming SMB's at the kernel
>level to get over the W2K Terminal Server problem.
>2). A utf8 case-insensitive filesystem (massive performance win).
>3). Implement SMBreadX/SMBwriteX in the kernel once a channel has
>been set up.
>4). Allow NT SD's stored in EA's to be interpreted by security
>code living in the kernel for open decisions.
>
>Everything else (IMHO) is better done in user space.

That is reasonably sensible, although the dirlookup may not be required to
be in kernel to take advantage of the particular issue of case-insensitive
file compares - if you are willing to live with case preserving/case
insensitive behavior for local apps too for a particular partition - jfs
allows formatting partitions case-insensitive (and it is probably doable in
others with more work).   Optimizing the Unicode string
comparisons/conversions would be a huge performance win and worth looking
at inkernel findfirst/findnext.

The new kernel nanosecond timestamps can probably be accessed in userspace
without requiring in kernel - but that feature was a nice recent addition
to the kernel.   Hooking in the kernel socket layer more sensibly for
scatter/gather like operations for SMB read/write to take advantage of TOEs
will be a big win.   There is plenty of precedent for doing a subset of SMB
ops in kernels, and throwing the rest to user space.   The addition of LSM
makes some very interesting authorization behaviors possible but is a
distinct in-kernel piece.    The addition of the well known xattr name for
the 32 bit quantity system.dosattributes (in addition to the two existing
well defined xattrs "system.defaultacl" etc.) would be helpful - probably
something I should submit to the lkml - the xattr is transparent to
everyone but cifs, smbfs and ntfs (only a few apps like backup apps and
Samba would care)

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