[Samba] SMB Direct support?

douxevip douxevip at protonmail.com
Thu Jul 25 20:52:39 UTC 2019


Hello all, I was reading up on SMB Direct support and it seems very interesting. I looked through slides of a presentation by Stefan Metzmacher about SMB Direct last year:

https://www.samba.org/~metze/presentations/2018/SDC/StefanMetzmacher_SDC2018-SMB-Direct-Status-rev1-presentation.pdf

I was wondering what the current support of of SMB Direct for Samba.
I have a Windows 10 Pro for Workstations machine that supports SMB Direct natively and I also have 2 Mellanox ConnectX-3 dual SFP+ cards (one in the Windows machine, one in a local server) that both support RDMA and RoCE (RDMA Over Converged Ethernet).  These systems are connected with a 10G SFP+ switch and fiber optic cables. iperf3 performance tests max out the connections, and I have enabled jumbo frames (MTU 9000).

The server is currently running Debian 10 with kernel 5.0.15, with Samba version 4.9.5. I have only SMB3 enabled in the smb.conf and I want to try out SMB Direct and see how much it improves performance in our local network.

Is it possible to get SMB Direct working already? If so, what steps are required? And if not, how far away are we from this feature? It seems like a massive performance boost, and with 10G cards, switches and cables becoming more affordable, it's a very interesting prospects from small businesses.

All help would be greatly appreciated.


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