[Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] async buffered diskio read for userspace apps

Volker Lendecke Volker.Lendecke at SerNet.DE
Fri Jan 23 05:18:38 MST 2015


Hi, Milosz!

On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 07:03:39PM -0500, Milosz Tanski wrote:
> Sorry for the spam to everybody in advance... this thread got away from me.
> 
> This is a general libsmbclient-raw question for you guys (even outside the
> context of FIO). How should an external person consuming libsmbclient-raw
> link to it?

The lower level libsmbclient with the async functions was never meant
to be externally consumed. I know this is a major deficiency, but nobody
took the time to make this a proper interfaces. Compared to the age of our
project, the async SMB2 client interface for example is relatively new,
and is still undergoing changes. This has served us well in the past,
because we had the freedom to experiment freely, and we definitely need a
place to do these experiments without API compatibility concerns. There
is certainly tension between features and a stable API. An example is
SMB3 multichannel or RDMA or other features not developed yet. These
features must show through at some layer, but you don't necessarily get
an API right the first time.

We had a similar discussion just recently with some internal
restructuring. OpenChange requires a certain library structure that we
broke without knowing.

As the Linux kernel people only know too well, API design can be
a difficult, and if you get it wrong you will get problems in the
future. We never took the time for the lower level SMB library, sorry.

This of course does not mean that we want to make it harder than
necessary, but we don't yet give promises about API stability here.

Volker

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